An Improved Method for Ranking of Search Results Based on User Interest

The most common task for a forensic investigator is to search a hard disk to find interesting evidences. While, the most search tools in digital forensic field fundamentally utilize text string match and index technology, which produce high recall (100%) and low precision. Investigators frequently waste vast time on huge irrelevant search hits. In this paper, we propose an improved method for ranking of search results to reduce human efforts on locating interesting hits. The search results are re-ranked using adaptive user interest hierarchies (AUIH), which considers both investigator-defined keywords and user interest learnt from electronic evidence. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is feasible and valuable in digital forensic search process.