<information science> Adding search terms to a user's
search. Query expansion is the process of a search engine
adding search terms to a user's weighted search. The
intent is to improve precision and/or recall. The
additional terms may be taken from a thesaurus. For example
a search for "car" may be expanded to: car cars auto autos
automobile automobiles.
The additional terms may also be taken from documents
that the user has specified as being relevant; this is the
basis for the "more like this" feature of some search engines.
The extra terms can have positive or negative weights.
(1999-08-27)
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