Interactive Search on the Web: The Story So Far

Abstract

Search on the web, specifically fetching of the relevant content, has been paid attention to since the advent of the web and particularly in recent years due to the tremendous growth in the volume of data and web pages. This paper categorizes the search services from the early days of the web to the present into keyword search engines, semantic search engines, question answering systems, dialogue systems and chatbots. As the first generation of search engines, keyword search engines have adopted keyword-based techniques to find the web pages containing the query keywords and ranking search results. In contrast, semantic search engines try to find meaningful and accurate results on the meaning and relations of things. Question-answering systems aim to find precise answers to natural language questions rather than returning a ranked list of relevant sources. As a subset of question answering systems, dialogue systems target to interact with human users through a dialog expressed in natural language. As a subset of dialogue systems, chatbots try to simulate human-like conversations. The paper provides an overview of the typical aspects of the studied search services, including process models, data preparation and presentation, common methodologies and categories.

Building Lightweight Semantic Search Engines

“…The history of interactive search is as old as the Web itself [15], and is closely intertwined with research into information retrieval and NLP research for extracting structured information from unstructured data [16]. Within this wider field, semantic search technology research [1] has developed many methods that exploit structured data and knowledge [2].…”

“…As highlighted in [18], we are now seeing a confluence between these two approaches, methods from which are combined in so-called "neuro-symbolic approaches". Our approach fits squarely into this category, as it covers keyword-based and natural language-based semantic services in the typology of [15]. Surprisingly, as far as we can see from recent surveys, no approaches seem to exist that exploit longer free text queries for information retrieval purposes.…”

Transparency and the future of semantic searching in academic libraries

“…Aghaei and fellow researchers [4] uncover the history of search and discovery tools used from the early days of the World Wide Web to the present. Their research found that the explosive growth of data has resulted in the need for radical changes in the way users find information.…”