Implicit links search enhancement system and method for search engines using implicit links generated by mining user access patterns

1. A computer-readable storage medium having stored and encoded thereon computer-executable instructions for performing on a computing device an enhanced local search of web sites and intranets by mining user access logs, comprising:

segmenting the user access log into different browsing sessions;

generating ordered pairs of pages from the browsing sessions to find implicit links by using a gliding window to move over explicit paths of the browsing sessions to generate the ordered pairs of pages;

determining a frequency of each of the ordered pairs;

defining a minimum support threshold;

applying the minimum support threshold to the frequency of each of the ordered pairs;

filtering the ordered pairs to remove any ordered pairs that are infrequently occurring;

constructing an implicit links graph from the implicit links;

generating two-item sequential patterns from the ordered pairs;

updating the implicit links graph using the two-item sequential patterns;

re-ranking search results obtained from a search engine to enhance the local searching to produce updated search results; and

displaying the updated search results to a user.

2. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 1 , further comprising pre-processing the user access log using at least one of: (a) data cleaning; (b) browsing session identification; (c) consecutive repetition elimination.

3. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 1 , further comprising identifying each individual ones of the browsing sessions.

4. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 3 , further comprising identifying in terms of a user identification and a chronological order of pages.

5. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 1 , further comprising defining the gliding window size, wherein the size represents a maximum interval a user clicks between a source page and a target page.

6. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 1 , further comprising discarding an ordered pair if its frequency is below the minimum support threshold.

7. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 1 , further comprising keeping an ordered pair if its frequency is above the minimum support threshold.

8. A computer-implemented method contained on computer-readable storage media having stored and encoded thereon computer-executable instructions for execution on a general-purpose computing device for enhancing initial search results of a search engine performing a local search of a web sub-space using a user access log, comprising:

using the general-purpose computing device to perform the following process actions:

pre-processing the user access log;

segmenting the log into browsing sessions;

generating ordered pairs of implicit links from the browsing sessions;

filtering the ordered pairs using a minimum support threshold to remove any infrequently occurring ordered pairs to generate two-item sequential patterns;

updating an implicit links graph using the two-item sequential patterns;

defining an adjacency matrix to describe the updated implicit links graph;

defining a modified re-ranking formula in terms of the adjacency matrix;

modifying the re-ranking formula using a random walk technique;

re-ranking the initial search results using the updated implicit links graph to generate enhanced search results; and

displaying the enhanced search results to a user.

9. The computer-implemented method as set forth in claim 8 , further comprising discarding any ordered pairs having a frequency below the minimum support threshold.

10. The computer-implemented method as set forth in claim 8 , further comprising keeping any ordered pairs having a frequency above the minimum support threshold.

11. The computer-implemented method as set forth in claim 8 , further comprising computing a page rank using the adjacency matrix.

12. The computer-implemented method as set forth in claim 8 , further comprising discarding any ordered pairs having a frequency below the minimum support threshold.

13. The computer-implemented method as set forth in claim 12 , wherein the random walk technique further comprises a probability parameter.

14. The computer-implemented method as set forth in claim 8 , wherein re-ranking further comprises using an order-based re-ranking technique.

15. The computer-implemented method as set forth in claim 14 , wherein the order-based re-ranking technique further comprises using a linear combination of page positions contained on two lists.

16. The computer-implemented method as set forth in claim 15 , wherein one of the two lists is sorted by similarity scores.

17. The computer-implemented method as set forth in claim 15 , wherein one of the lists is sorted by PageRank values.

18. The computer-implemented method as set forth in claim 8 , wherein re-ranking further comprises using an score-based re-ranking technique.

19. The computer-implemented method as set forth in claim 18 , wherein the score-based re-ranking technique further comprises using a linear combination of a content-based similarity score and a PageRank value of all pages.