STAIR: A System for Topical and Aggregated Information Retrieval

© STAIR : A System for Topical and Aggregated Information Retrieval C.V. Krishnakumar, Krishnan Ramanathan HP Laboratories HPL-2009-51 STAIR, Search, Focused Crawling, Information Retrieval Web content has exploded dramatically in the last decade and search is becoming increasingly complex. In the current search paradigm, the user has to enter the query and is immediately presented results that are typically accessed sequentially. However, there are scenarios where the above model is not appropriate, either because results being in consumable form is more important than immediacy of results, or because the it is difficult and time consuming to navigate the results in sequential fashion. In this work, we describe the architecture, implementation and utility of STAIRThe System for Topical and Aggregated Information Retrieval, that uses a variant of focused crawling and retrieves relevant information from the web. We present a new interface that selects search results from different search engines, ranks the results and presents the most relevant results as an aggregated PDF document. External Posting Date: March 6, 2009 [Fulltext] Approved for External Publication Internal Posting Date: March 6, 2009 [Fulltext] Published and presented at the First International Conference on HCI, Allahabad, India. Jan 20-23, 2009 Copyright the First International Conference on HCI, 2009 STAIR : A System for Topical and Aggregated Information Retrieval C.V.Krishnakumar Krishnan Ramanathan Stanford University, California, USA. HP Laboratories, Bangalore, India Web content has exploded dramatically in the last decade and search is becoming increasingly complex. In the current search paradigm, the user has to enter the query and is immediately presented results that are typically accessed sequentially. However, there are scenarios where the above model is not appropriate, either because results being in consumable form is more important than immediacy of results, or because the it is difficult and time consuming to navigate the results in sequential fashion. In this work, we describe the architecture, implementation and utility of STAIRThe System for Topical and Aggregated Information Retrieval, that uses a variant of focused crawling and retrieves relevant information from the web. We present a new interface that selects search results from different search engines, ranks the results and presents the most relevant results as an aggregated PDF document.