CS297 Proposal

Improving Yioop! User Search Data Usage

Tarun Pepira Ramaswamy(tarun.pepira@gmail.com)

Advisor: Dr. Chris Pollett

Description:

One of Dr.Pollett's previous student, Vijaya Pamidi, wrote a Firefox extension which captures URL's visited in Firefox and sends these to the Yioop Search Engine. One of the disadvantages of this extension is its lack of user benefit for sending the data to Yioop leading to non usage of this extension. Also, relevance of the URL data from this extension is computed in an ad hoc way.

My project will add a visualization feature to this Firefox extension encouraging the users to use this extension. The vizualation will show the user navigation across the visited URL's providing some user benefit. My project will also implement a more theoretically sound way of computing relevance for this data, based on modern web reputation systems. Currently, the user clicked URL's from the Yioop search result page is not being tracked. A last goal of this project will be to track these URL's clicks and incorporate them in the index.

Schedule:

Week 1: Aug.23-Aug.27Write CS 297 Proposal
Week 2: Aug.30-Sept.3 Learn to build the Firefox extension
Week 3: Sept.6-Sept.10 Build a Simple Firefox Extension
Week 4: Sept.13-Sept.17Update the Firefox Extension with Preference pane
Week 5: Sept.20-Sept.24[Deliverable 1 due] Experiment with pulling the history data
Week 6: Sept.27-Oct.1Learn SVG/Canvas to display data points
Week 7: Oct.4-Oct.8Experiment with SVG/Canvas to display data
Week 8: Oct.11-Oct.15Display control flow across URLs
Week 9: Oct.18-Oct.22[Deliverable 2 due] Create a simple graphical view of the history data
Week 10: Oct.25-Oct.29Experiment with user clicks on search result page
Week 11: Nov.1-Nov.5Implement to add user clicks in the Search Result Page
Week 12: Nov.8-Nov.12Deliverable 3 due] Study the current indexing of Yioop
Week 13: Nov.15-Nov.19Study the new indexing techniques to be used for User data
Week 14: Nov.22-Nov.26[Deliverable 4 due] Propose a better indexing technique for th User data
Week 15: Nov.29-Dec.3Write CS 297 Report
Week 16: Dec.6-Dec.10Deliverable 5 due

Deliverables:

The full project will be done when CS298 is completed. The following will be done by the end of CS297:

1. Creating a simple Firefox extension and adding a preference pane

2. Study and create a simple graphical view of the history data

3. Update the code to use the user clicks in search result page

4. Study and propose a better way of indexing the user search data

5. A CS297 report

References:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Building_an_Extension

[RANDY2010]Building Web Reputation Systems: By Randy Farmer, Bryce Glass, March 2010

[AMY2006]Google's PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings: by Amy N. Langville and Carl D. Meyer

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/SVG

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Canvas