B-Hist: Entity-Centric Search Over Personal Web Browsing History

Abstract

Web Search is increasingly entity-centric; as a large fraction of common queries target specific entities, search results get progressively augmented with semi-structured and multimedia information about those entities. However, search over personal Web browsing history still revolves around keyword-search mostly. In this paper, we present a novel approach to answer queries over Web browsing logs that takes into account entities appearing in the Web pages, user activities, as well as temporal information. Our system, B-hist, aims at providing Web users with an effective tool for searching and accessing information they previously looked up on the Web by supporting multiple ways of filtering results using clustering and entity-centric search. In the following, we present our system and motivate our User Interface design choices by detailing the results of a survey on Web browsing and history search. In addition, we present an empirical evaluation of our entity-based approach used to cluster Web pages.

Keywords: browsing history, personal memories, entity-centric search