WEST: Modern Technologies for Web People Search

In this paper we describe WEST (Web entity search technologies) system that we have developed to improve people search over the Internet. Recently the problem of Web people search (WePS) has attracted significant attention from both the industry and academia. In the classic formulation of WePS problem the user issues a query to a Web search engine that consists of a name of a person of interest. For such a query, a traditional search engine such as Yahoo or Google would return Web pages that are related to any people who happened to have the queried name. The goal of WePS, instead, is to output a set of clusters of Web pages, one cluster per each distinct person, containing all of the Web pages related to that person. The user then can locate the desired cluster and explore the Web pages it contains.