WebYacht: A Concept-Based Search Tool for WWW

This paper describes a Web information search tool called WebYacht. The goal of WebYacht is to solve the problem of imprecise search results in current Web search engines. Due to incomplete information given by users and the diversified information published on the Web, conventional document ranking based on an automatic assessment of document relevance to the query may not be the best approach when little information is given as in most cases. In order to clarify the ambiguity of the short queries given by users, WebYacht adopts cluster-based browsing model as well as relevance feedback to facilitate Web information search. The idea is to have users give two to three times more feedback in the same amount of time that would be required to give feedback for conventional feedback mechanisms. With the assistance of cluster-based representation provided by WebYacht, a lot of browsing labor can be reduced. In this paper, we explain the techniques used in the design of WebYacht and compare the performances of feedback interface designs and to conventional similarity ranking search results.