IST Associate Professor Jim Jansen is making big headlines in tech news. He was quoted in a recent article titled “25 leading-edge IT research projects” which was then linked from Slashdot. This article shows a glimpse into the future of IT by listing 25 amazing university research projects being conducted worldwide.

Danielle Booth (Senior, IST) is a co-researcher on this project.

Dr. Jansen and Booth are working on technology that, like magic, can determine a user’s motivations based on his or her queries into a search engine.

Ultimately, the goal of a search engine is to accurately determine a user’s intent and serve relevant results. Google has emerged at the top of the pack because it was able to take advantage of link authority being passed between webpages to determine much more relevant results than the other leading search engines at the time.

Now, Dr. Jansen’s research takes modern search technology one step further by being able to precisely label a user query informational, navigational and transactional (related to buying something) based on simple keywords. This will allow for a better user experience in something like Google’s Personalized Search Results.

When asked to provide some more details about his research to the IST Building, Dr. Jansen said,

Our goal was ‘automatically’ identify the desired content of Web searchers based solely on their interactions with a Web search engine. Using a binary tree approach, we were pretty successful, about 75%! By successfully identifying user intent, the impact for search engines is that they can service more relevant content. This is especially important in the commercial domain.

Dr. Jim Jansen and Danielle Booth’s research results will be published in an article titled “Determining the informational, navigational and transactional intent of Web queries” that will appear in the May issue of Information Processing & Management.

Tags: google, jim jansen, Research, search engine, slashdot

Categories: News, Research