Searcher´s Activity in Standalone and Web Applications as a Source for Search Query Expansion

The Web has so much variable information, therefore searching a specific one is complex task. To find something valuable, specifying good search query is crucial. However, average search query consists of only about two words which cannot specify intent of a searcher well. We suppose that these words follow in most cases the searcher´s activity. Based on this assumption we propose an approach for search query extension by the searcher activity context. The activity context contains words reflecting the searcher´s activity context expressed by keywords gathered from the content of one of the very recent activities within applications provided by the searcher. We present an approach for finding out searcher´s activity context by analyzing the content and his interaction between applications considering both standalone applications and applications running inside a browser. Our method uses the activity logs to find a connection between the search query and specific application. Then we extend the query by terms gathered by analyzing the selected application content. We evaluate our approach in a series of experiments based on data gathered by monitoring a group of searchers by means of developed logger prototype.