Full-Privacy Secured Search Engine Empowered by Efficient Genome-Mapping Algorithms.

Googling for Health Information

When we search information on the Web, we usually enter a query that best represents our information need, and then modify it as the search results are shown. Many thus have studied search queries to understand how users express and find their information need on the Web. For example, studies have shown that query length affects search performance (Belkin et al, 2003). Then, researchers have begun to examine image search queries on the Web. They analyzed search logs from general or commercial search engines or studied specific image database systems based on log analysis (Goodrum & Sprink, 2001; Jorgensen & Jorgensen, 2005; Goodrum, Bejune, & Siochi, 2003; Pu, 2005; Cunningham, Bainbridge, & Masoodian, 2004). While these studies provide basic understanding of image query formulation, further characteristics of user's queries in the interactive searching process have not been explored. This study thus builds on previous studies on image search queries by examining the patterns of query formulation and modification in visual information search. Specifically, first, it investigates the effects of tasks and other contextual factors on query length and query changes; and second, it compares the query length and changes with the user's satisfaction of search results. Participants Twenty-nine college students were recruited for data collection during the spring and summer semesters of 2008, mostly from the Department of Media Studies at the Catholic University of America (CUA). They included 22 from Media Studies and 7 from other fields taking courses in the department; 22 were females and 7 males; and an average age of 21 years. Background information collected were years of computer experience, hours per day using the Web, self-rated online searching expertise, and self-rated digital image searching experience. The seven-point Likert scale was used for self-rating variables. Each participant took part in three different search sessions with his or her own search topic at CUA with the researcher's laptop that had an Internet connection. The university's homepage was set as the default home for the Web browser. Each participant filled out a pre-search questionnaire to collect a search task, topic, self-rated topic familiarity using 7-Likert scale. The participants chose their own preferred browser between Internet Explorer and Firefox. The search session was recorded by Camtasia v5.0 as screen capture. After the session, a post-search questionnaire was given to the participants to assess the level of satisfaction and confidence of their searching using 7-Likert scale. There was no time limit to complete a search session. The participants were free to end a search session at any time. Search Tasks The participants brought their own task and topics to find images. There were three types of search tasks identified: academic task, work-related task, and personal interest (Table 1). Search queries were acquired from screen capture log files. A total of 979 queries were obtained as the entire string of terms submitted by the participants. Table 2 shows a distribution of search queries on a general search engine, a search engine's image search, and other specific sites. Findings showed that Google Images Search was the most frequent source for forming a search query. An average word per query was 3.07 during the first session, 2.95 during the second session, and 2.89 for the last session. This finding of short queries is similar to that of previous studies on Web image queries (Goodrum & Spink, 2001; Jorgensen & Jorgensen, 2005). Analysis of data is in progress. A poster will summarize detail findings and provide answers to the following questions: What are the patterns of query modification? Are there any differences of query length and number of query change based on the task and topic familiarities? Is there any relationship between query length and number of query change and users' satisfaction and confidence with search results? Do different stages of a user's particular task affect query length and number of query change? The author would like to thank OCLC/ALISE for their generous funding for this project.

Variation in Results of Three Biology‐Focused Search Engines: A Case Study Using North American Tree Species

Due to the increasing information on the Web it becomes very difficult for a single search engine to provide comprehensive Web coverage, thus increasing the difficulty for an average user to search information on the web. We have proposed an idea for smart Meta search engine which will have a more comprehensive coverage of the web by targeting different search engines for different search categories. The user's search query will be modified using a knowledge base and appropriate search engine will be selected. The results returned from these search engines will be merged and ranked. These results will be classified into various categories using a classification algorithm and then the result will be displayed sorted into categories. It will be beneficial to the user who has an obscure idea about the information he/she wanted to search.

Over the past decade, the volume of information available digitally over the Internet has grown enormously. Technical developments in the area of search, such as Google's Page Rank algorithm, have proved so good at serving relevant results that Internet search has become integrated into daily human activity. One can endlessly explore topics of interest simply by querying and reading through the resulting links. Yet, although search engines are well known for providing relevant results based on users' queries, users do not always receive the results they are looking for. Google's Director of Research describes clickstream evidence of frustrated users repeatedly reformulating queries and searching through page after page of results. Given the general quality of search engine results, one must consider the possibility that the frustrated user's query is not effective; that is, it does not describe the essence of the user's interest. Indeed, extensive research into human search behavior has found that humans are not very effective at formulating good search queries that describe what they are interested in. Ideally, the user should simply point to a portion of text that sparked the user's interest, and a system should automatically formulate a search query that captures the essence of the text. In this paper, we describe an implemented system that provides this capability. We first describe how our work differs from existing work in automatic query formulation, and propose a new method for improved quantification of the relevance of candidate search terms drawn from input text using phrase‐level analysis. We then propose an implementable method designed to provide relevant queries based on a user's text input. We demonstrate the quality of our results and performance of our system through experimental studies. Our results demonstrate that our system produces relevant search terms with roughly two‐thirds precision and recall compared to search terms selected by experts, and that typical users find significantly more relevant results (31% more relevant) more quickly (64% faster) using our system than self‐formulated search queries. Further, we show that our implementation can scale to request loads of up to 10 requests per second within current online responsiveness expectations (<2‐second response times at the highest loads tested).

Today’s conventional search engines hardly do provide the essential content relevant to the user’s search query. This is because the context and semantics of the request made by the user is not analyzed to the full extent. So here the need for a semantic web search arises. SWS is upcoming in the area of web search which combines Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence. The objective of the work done here is to design, develop and implement a semantic search engine - SIEU(Semantic Information Extraction in University Domain) confined to the university domain. SIEU uses ontology as a knowledge base for the information retrieval process. It is not just a mere keywordsearch. It is one layer above what Google or any other search engines retrieve by analyzing just the keywords. Here the query is analyzed both syntactically and semantically. The developed system retrieves the web results more relevant to the user query through keyword expansion. The results obtained here will be accurate enough to satisfy the request made by the user. The level of accuracy will be enhanced since the query is analyzed semantically. The system will be of great use to the developers and rese archers who work on web. The Google results are re-ranked and optimized for providing the relevant links. For ranking an algorithm has been applied which fetches more apt results for the user query.

By regularly querying Web search engines, users (unconsciously) disclose large amounts of their personal data as part of their search queries, among which some might reveal sensitive information (e.g. health issues, sexual, political or religious preferences). Several solutions exist to allow users querying search engines while improving privacy protection. However, these solutions suffer from a number of limitations: some are subject to user re-identification attacks, while others lack scalability or are unable to provide accurate results. This paper presents CYCLOSA, a secure, scalable and accurate private Web search solution. CYCLOSA improves security by relying on trusted execution environments (TEEs) as provided by Intel SGX. Further, CYCLOSA proposes a novel adaptive privacy protection solution that reduces the risk of user re- identification. CYCLOSA sends fake queries to the search engine and dynamically adapts their count according to the sensitivity of the user query. In addition, CYCLOSA meets scalability as it is fully decentralized, spreading the load for distributing fake queries among other nodes. Finally, CYCLOSA achieves accuracy of Web search as it handles the real query and the fake queries separately, in contrast to other existing solutions that mix fake and real query results.

Vector-based image search, which represents images and search queries as vectors in a high-dimensional space, performs image search by identifying images whose vector representations closely match the vector representation of the query. Search engine optimization has been traditionally achieved by using relevant keywords to increase organic search engine discoverability. For images to be surfaced as a result of a search query, these relevant keywords have been inserted into the page that hosts the image or embedded directly into an image as metadata that can be decoded and indexed by a text-based search engine. However, when a search engine uses vectors to operate, the static nature of an image's vector representation prevents adaptation of content to increase discoverability. In this paper, we present a novel approach to alter an image in a way that enhances its discoverability with a known vector-based search engine while minimizing the visual impact of these alterations for the average user. The alteration is guided by the maximization of intended search queries and the minimization of unwanted search queries.

Web search engines have long served as indispensable tools for information retrieval; user behavior and query formulation strategies have been well studied. The introduction of search engines powered by large language models (LLMs) suggested more conversational search and new types of query strategies. In this paper, we compare traditional and LLM-based search for the task of image geolocation, i.e., determining the location where an image was captured. Our work examines user interactions, with a particular focus on query formulation strategies. In our study, 60 participants were assigned either traditional or LLM-based search engines as assistants for geolocation. Participants using traditional search more accurately predicted the location of the image compared to those using the LLM-based search. Distinct strategies emerged between users depending on the type of assistant. Participants using the LLM-based search issued longer, more natural language queries, but had shorter search sessions. When reformulating their search queries, traditional search participants tended to add more terms to their initial queries, whereas participants using the LLM-based search consistently rephrased their initial queries.

Geography is becoming increasingly important in web search. Search engines can often return better results to users by analyzing features such as user location or geographic terms in web pages and user queries. This is also of great commercial value as it enables location specific advertising and improved search for local businesses. As a result, major search companies have invested significant resources into geographic search technologies, also often called local search.This paper studies geographic search queries, i.e., text queries such as hotel new york that employ geographical terms in an attempt to restrict results to a particular region or location. Our main motivation is to identify opportunities for improving geographical search and related technologies, and we perform an analysis of 36 million queries of the recently released AOL query trace. First, we identify typical properties of geographic search (geo) queries based on a manual examination of several thousand queries. Based on these observations, we build a classifier that separates the trace into geo and non-geo queries. We then investigate the properties of geo queries in more detail, and relate them to web sites and users associated with such queries. We also propose a new taxonomy for geographic search queries.

Most research oriented search queries consist of multiple topics belonging to one or more domains of knowledge. The objective of such search queries is to find the relationship or impact that each topic has on the other(s). Though web search engines provide easy means to retrieve information off the web, search engines are mainly key word oriented and do not consider the different topics and relationships between such topics present in the results. This project presents a software solution, `SearchDroid' that acts as an intermediate user between a search engine and the end user, refining search results based on different topics identified in the search query and their presence and relationships depicted in search results. A discourse parsing approach has been used to build discourse structures that represent the rhetorical relations of text in search results; this is used to re-rank results based on topics identified in the search query. The project combines linguistics research under discourse parsing with web information retrieval techniques. The lack of literature combining discourse parsing techniques with web information retrieval has been compensated for by introducing a fresh algorithmic approach. An abstract information retrieval mechanism has been created with the use of discourse parsing techniques, and can be integrated into any web information retrieval approach. The system was evaluated by Linguistic Experts, Technical Experts and End users. All experts agreed that a discourse parsing approach was suitable for addressing the problem at hand and that the project had high research value in the aspect of linking linguistics research with web information retrieval research. Hands-on testing of the system by End Users produced high user acceptance of the proposed system.

Search engines are turning out to be the greatest tools for gaining valuable data from the internet. Search engines return the search result to the user query which can be an important result or non-important result. Because, the users naturally look only at the first few pages of search results, and search engine ranking can introduce significant bias to their understanding of the internet and their information gain. When a search query is delivered to several search engines, each individual returns a list of pages based on the ranking. Scientists have confirmed that merging search results in a meta-search engine makes a substantial progress in a search result. Current meta-search engines use several search engines for fetching the results but do not emphasize on the semantic relation of the query for finding the best result. In order tod overcome this limitation, a new approach is proposed. The proposed approach can optimize meta-search results using the combination of linear search and semantic search.

Mobile devices such as smart phones, the iPhone, and the iPad have become more popular in recent years. With access to the Internet through cellular or WIFI networks, these mobile devices can make use of the great source of information available on the Internet. Unlike a desktop or laptop computer, an Internet enabled mobile device is designed to be carried around and available to the owner almost instantly at any moment of the day. Despite having such great advantage and potential, searching for information with a mobile device remains a difficult task. Mobile device users have to juggle between different search engines through the web browser to seek useful information. The small screen of most mobile devices makes it very difficult to interact with the search engines using the device's web browser. This project focuses on the development of a mobile application that attempts to make information searching easier for mobile device users. In addition, the application is designed to answer search queries that are related to the medical field. Search query in the medical field requires more selective results and that the results come from trusted 4 sources before it can be used. The application addresses this problem by introducing a database of community knowledge designed to store credible medically related articles that could help answer medical specific search queries. This would help minimize the need to look for answers from the Internet, which often could contain unreliable information. In addition to answering search queries, the application also allows user to store personal medical records and conveniently share that information as needed using email.

Legal Help Search Audit: Are Search Engines Effective Brokers of Legal Information?

Android developers often need to search for example code to complete their development tasks. While existing code search systems for Android can deliver code against a search query, they do not recommend code for features that a developer might later need to implement. In this paper, we present FACER-AS (FACER for Android Studio); an Android Studio plugin, which uses FACER (Feature-driven API usage-based Code Examples Recommender) as its back-end code search and recommendation engine. FACER provides relevant code against natural language queries (Stage 1) and also recommends code of multiple related features (Stage 2) to facilitate opportunistic code reuse. To evaluate FACER-AS, we perform a user study involving one professional Android developer who uses our tool for the development of their ongoing live Android projects. We analyze the developer's usage of our tool over a span of seven days and find that FACER-AS achieves a 79% success rate for retrieving code against user queries (Stage 1) and a 41% success rate for recommending code for related features (Stage 2). We also observe a 43% reuse rate of Stage 1 recommendations and a 45% reuse rate of Stage 2 recommendations. Our tool's performance analysis and the developer's positive feedback show that FACER-AS can help Android developers with their coding activities. A video demonstration of our tool is available at https://youtu.be/3yN-39wP_FU and the source code of our tool is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5176816.