The Journey is the Reward - Towards New Paradigms in Web Search

Without search engines the information content of the World Wide Web would remain largely closed for the ordinary user. Current web search engines work well as long as the user knows what she is looking for. The situation becomes problematic, if the user has insufficient expertise or prior knowledge to formulate the search query. Often a sequence of search requests is necessary to answer the user’s information needs, whenever knowledge has to be accumulated first to determine the next search query. On the other hand, retrieval systems for traditional archives face the problem that there is possibly not always a result for an arbitrary search query, simply because of the limited number of documents available. Semantic search systems (try to) determine the meaning of the content of the archived documents first and thus in principle are able to overcome problems of traditional keyword-based search engines concerning the processing of natural language. Moreover, content-based relationships among the documents can be used to filter, navigate, and explore the archive. Content-based ‘intelligent’ recommendations help to open up the archive and to discover new paths across the search space.