Publication Date

Spring 2011

Degree Type

Master's Project

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Chris Pollett

Second Advisor

T. Y. Lin

Third Advisor

Robert Chun

Keywords

Browser Toolbar Traffic Rank

Abstract

Search engines results are typically ordered according to some notion of importance of a web page as well as relevance of the content of a web page to a query. Web page importance is usually calculated based on some graph theoretic properties of the web. Another common technique to measure page importance is to make use of the traffic that goes to a particular web page as measured by a browser toolbar. Currently, there are some traffic ranking tools available like www.alexa.com, www.ranking.com, www.compete.com that give such analytic as to the number of users who visit a web site. Alexa provides the traffic rank for a website based on two factors: The number of users that view a website and the number of pages viewed. The Alexa toolbar is not open-source.
The main goal of our project was to create a Smart Search Firefox add-on for the Yioop search engine, an open source search engine developed by my project advisor, Dr. Chris Pollett. This add-on would provide similar analytic data to the Yioop search engine, but in a transparent and open-source way. With the results received from the Smart Search toolbar extension, the Yioop search engine refines the search results as well as provides user centric-search results. Eventually, users would benefit from these better search results.

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