On ranking and organizing Web query results

With the explosive growth of the WWW, most searches retrieve a large number of documents. The query results returned have no aggregate structure; thus, it is difficult to forage for relevant pages. We argue that organization of Web query results is essential to the user in terms of usability of query results. In addition, how the query results are organized has a great impact on the ranking scheme and query processing as well as search engine usability for the users. We present various schemes on ranking and organizing Web query results in the scope of the Net Topix search engine project in NEC Research Laboratories in San Jose. We describe three associated tasks: full-text search and initial ranking, post query processing, and query result reorganization for presentation. We discuss our consideration and pros and cons of each design alternative.