A study of web mining tools for query optimization

Abstract

The World Wide Web or simply the web may be seen as a huge collection of documents freely produced and published by a very large number of people, without any solid editorial control. This is probably the most democratic and anarchic widespread mean for anyone to express feelings, comments, convictions and ideas, independently of ethnics, sex, religion or any other characteristic of human societies. The web constitutes a comprehensive, dynamic, up-to-date repository of information regarding most of the areas of human knowledge and support an increasingly important part of commercial, artistic, scientific and personal transactions, which gives rise to a very strong interest from individuals, as well as from institutions, at a universal scale. However, the web also exhibits some characteristics that are adverse to the process of collecting information from it in order to satisfy specific needs some of the characteristics are, the large volume of data it contains, its dynamic nature, constituted by unstructured or semi-structured data, content and format heterogeneity and irregular data quality. End-users also introduce some additional difficulties in the retrieval process. Information needs are often imprecisely defined, generating a semantic gap between user needs and their specification. The satisfaction of a specific information need on the web is supported by search engines and other tools aimed at helping users to gather information from the web. While information retrieval (IR) has been an active field of research for decades, for much of its history it has had a very strong bias towards English as the language of choice for research and evaluation purposes. Whatever they may have been, over the years, many of the motivations for an almost exclusive focus on English as the language of choice in IR have lost their validity. The Internet is no longer monolingual, as the non- English content is growing rapidly. Asia is the largest and the most culturally and linguistically diverse continent.