Contextual Searching

Contextual searching refers to proactively capturing the information need of a user by automatically augmenting the user query with information extracted from the search context; for example, by using terms from the web page the user is currently browsing or knowledge of previous searches.

A number of algorithms are used to implement contextual search including:

• Query rewriting - augments each query with appropriate terms from the search context (which could be implemented by reference to a thesaurus).
• Rank-biasing  - generates a representation of the context and answers queries by altering the relevance skewing within the search (for example, by date, related topic, author)
• Iterative filtering meta-search – provides contextual navigators (like taxonomy topic maps) which allow the user to refine their query.