Evelyn Balfe

IJCAI Conference 2005 Conference Paper

A Live-User Evaluation of Collaborative Web Search

• Barry Smyth
• Evelyn Balfe
• Oisin Boydell
• Keith Bradley
• Peter Briggs
• Maurice Coyle
• Jill

Collaborative Web search exploits repetition and regularity within the query-space of a community of like-minded individuals in order to improve the quality of search results. In short, search results that have been judged to be relevant for past queries are promoted in response to similar queries that occur in the future. In this paper we present the results of a large-scale evaluation of this approach, in a corporate Web search scenario, which shows that significant benefits are available to its users.

ECAI Conference 2004 Conference Paper

Improving Web Search through Collaborative Query Recommendation

• Evelyn Balfe
• Barry Smyth

IJCAI Conference 2003 Conference Paper

Collaborative Web Search

• Barry Smyth
• Evelyn Balfe
• Peter Briggs
• Maurice Coyle
• Jill Freyne

Web search engines struggle to satisfy the needs of Web users. Users are notoriously poor at representing their needs in the form of a query, and search engines are poor at responding to vague queries. However progress has been made by introducing context into the search process. In this paper we describe and evaluate a novel approach to using context in Web search that adapts a generic search engine for the needs of a specialist community of users. This collaborative search method enjoys significant performance benefits and avoids the privacy and security concerns that are commonly associated with related personalization research.