Fast adapting value estimation-based hybrid architecture for searching the world-wide web

The slogan that information is power has undergone a slight change. Today, information updating is in the focus of interest. The largest source of information is the world-wide web. Fast search methods are in need for this enormous source. In this paper a hybrid architecture that combines soft support vector classification and reinforcement learning for value estimation is introduced for the evaluation of a link (a document) and its neighboring links (or documents), called the context of a document. The method is motivated by (i) large differences between such contexts on the web, (ii) the facilitation of goal oriented search using context classifiers, and (iii) attractive fast adaptation properties, that could counteract diversity of web environments. We demonstrate that value estimation-based fast adaptation offers considerable improvement over other known search methods. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.