Query Suggestion by Query Search: A New Approach to User Support in Web Search

This paper introduces and analyzes a new approach to query suggestion. After the user issues a query q_0, for every document retrieved in a certain rank range [Theta_1,Theta_2], a query search procedure constructs queries that rank the document high enough for the user to see it. From this set of queries the suggestions to be presented to the user are then selected so as to give the best possible access to the documents that were ranked in [Theta_1,Theta_2] for the user's initial query q_0. This approach turns out to be successful under certain assumptions, which are discussed in this paper.