Estimating the breadth of search queries

This paper proposes a novel method to estimate the breadth of a search query. Using the spatial distribution of relevant categories in a taxonomy, together with an ‘importance’ score obtained using a ranked list of search results, we derive a metric that represents the breadth of a query. Several experiments have been performed on the DMOZ hierarchy with two different sets of queries and benchmarked with state-of-the-art results. Evaluation of the method based on metrics such as F-measure and accuracy indicate better agreement with human judgements.