Using annotations in enterprise search

A major difference between corporate intranets and the Internet is that in intranets the barrier for users to create web pages is much higher. This limits the amount and quality of anchor text, one of the major factors used by Internet search engines, making intranet search more difficult. The social phenomenon at play also means that spam is relatively rare. Both on the Internet and in intranets, users are often willing to cooperate with the search engine in improving the search experience. These characteristics naturally lead to considering using user feedback to improve search quality in intranets. In this paper we show how a particular form of feedback, namely user annotations, can be used to improve the quality of intranet search. An annotation is a short description of the contents of a web page, which can be considered a substitute for anchor text. We propose two ways to obtain user annotations, using explicit and implicit feedback, and show how they can be integrated into a search engine. Preliminary experiments on the IBM intranet demonstrate that using annotations improves the search quality.