Petros Demetriades, King's College London

It is estimated that web search is today one of the most popular
Internet-related activities, is second only to e-mail. Furthermore, it
is an incontestable fact that a lot of people depend on the web for
satisfying their daily, widely varied information needs. Web search
engines, which systematically "crawl" the web discovering and indexing
web resources and allow users to query their indexes through web-based
user interfaces, have been successful in facilitating web information
retrieval and empowering all types of web users, from novices to
seasoned web professionals, to search the web.

However, the size of the web, the limitations of the facilities provided
by contemporary mainstream search engines and web browsers and a number
of other problems, all contribute to a web information retrieval (web
IR) process that is riddled with time-wasteful repetitive tasks that
reduce its overall effectiveness. In this talk, Petros will discuss his
PhD thesis entitled "Towards a more effective web information retrieval
process for end-users", which details 15 such problems, identifies
solutions, presents a new web IR process and a prototype tool that
implements it and discusses evaluation of the new process & tool against
the typical web IR process.