David Anick had an interesting paper looking at properties of search
engine queries; I think it was in SIGIR 1994. As I recall, the basic
idea was to look at how users *modified* their queries -- looking at
their manual query refinement process provided some interesting
potential insights into how to do some of it automatically.
Philip
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Philip Resnik, Assistant Professor
Department of Linguistics and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
1401 Marie Mount Hall UMIACS phone: (301) 405-6760
University of Maryland Linguistics phone: (301) 405-8903
College Park, MD 20742 USA Fax : (301) 405-7104
http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik E-mail: resnik@umiacs.umd.edu