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MSRA SRC Toolbar 1.12 Release Notes
These release notes describe the MSRA SRC Toolbar developed at Web Search and Mining Group in MSR, Asia. For any problems you met in the installation and using, please contact hjzeng@microsoft.com.
Contents
What's MSRA SRC Toolbar
Usage of MSRA SRC Toolbar
System Requirements
Installation and uninstall
Known Problems
What's MSRA SRC Toolbar
MSRA SRC Toolbar is a tool for searching web with the Search Result Clustering (SRC) technique, which is developed at Web Search and Mining Group in MSR, Asia. It on-the-fly clusters a certain search engine's search results into different groups, and provide meaningful and readable names for these groups. SRC changes the traditional representation of search results into a non-linear way, so as to facilitate user's browsing.
Traditional clustering techniques don't work for this problem because the documents are short, the cluster names should be readable and the algorithm should be efficient for on-the-fly calculation. Our method take the whole problem in another way and overcome the difficulties in traditional clustering method. Basically, we try to first identify salient topics by identifying distinct and independent keyword, and then classify the search results into these topics.
The following is the corresponding paper to this technology:
Hua-Jun Zeng, Qi-Cai He, Zheng Chen,
and Wei-Ying Ma.
Learning To Cluster Web Search
Results. In Proceedings of the 27th annual international
conference on research and development in information retrieval
(SIGIR'04), pp. 210-217, Sheffield, United Kingdom, July 2004. [
][
]
Usage of MSRA SRC Toolbar
To use this toolbar, please first install it and then you can see the following toolbar in the IE window:
The usage of this toolbar is very simple: you first input the query into the first edit box, select a search engine from the third drop down list, and then click “search”.
There are two modes of the toolbar. The toolbar require a network connection for both modes; and require a corp network connection for the first mode:
Clustering-mode
When the “clustering” button on the toolbar is pushed in, the toolbar is working in the clustering-mode. In the clustering mode, each query is send to a back-end clustering server. On this server, we retrieve back the search results of a certain search engine, do the online clustering, and then show the re-formatted results.
The search results are reformatted to 2 columns: the first column is the clusters generated by our method and the second column is the corresponding documents list to the current cluster. You can change the clusters to see the different document list.
Non-clustering-mode
When the “clustering” button on the toolbar is NOT pushed in. In the non-clustering mode, the toolbar acts as a normal MSN search bar, which just send the query to the search engine directly and show the results.
We currently support the result clustering of following search engines:
System Requirements
This toolbar requires the Windows 2000/xp system.
Installation and uninstall
Installation
Run SRC_Toolbar.exe and click install button, then this toolbar will be installed on your Internet Explorer.
Notice: the installer need close all Internet Explorer windows for conflict-free installation. If there are some Internet Explorer you won't close, please cancel the installer and install later.
Uninstall
There are two ways to uninstall this toolbar: