Readings in Education and Technology: Proceedings of ICICTE 2008 615 A PROPOSED QUERY OPTIMIZATION METHOD TO BOOST STUDENTS USE OF SEARCH ENGINES Amine V. Bitar and Antoine M. Melki Department of Computer Science University of Balamand Lebanon Abstract Students, as Internet users, expect quality results in terms of relevance, format and response time, and are more concerned about quality than quantity. On the other hand, the main goal of the search engine system is to retrieve information which is supposed to be relevant to the student’s request in the shortest time possible. New techniques in the area of information retrieval by search engines are developed. This paper starts by describing the problems faced by students in their searches. A query optimization method is proposed consisting of extracting some information, including IP address, from the server log file to be used in later searches. This enhancement of search results is expected to improve the relevance of information and consequently the reliance of students on the search engine. Introduction The Internet, as an international worldwide resource, has millions of information pages with a wide range and nature of materials. Search has become an essential service required by all students looking for information via the Internet. Search can be defined as an information retrieval activity. A search engine must attract the students by finding and returning relevant information in a short response time. The student translates a request into a query of one or more keywords in order to be processed by the search engine. The main goal of the search engine system is to retrieve information which must be relevant to the student’s request in the shortest time possible. Successful search is one where results most relevant are listed first. The vast quantity of Internet information sets new challenge to provide students with the results they consider most relevant listed first. The objective of this paper is to present a method called Search Booster. The Search Booster allows obtaining the usage data specific to each IP address from the web server log file. The aim is to boost the quality of the search engine performance in order to improve the value of the results returned to the student’s keyword search in a short response time. It explores and demonstrates how Internet protocol address (IP) information can enhance current log file techniques to supply valuable data. This paper is organized as follows: information retrieval through search engines is exposed. Search layers structure is presented. The importance of query