 Chapter XXVII The Perspectives of Improving Web Search Engine Quality Jengchung V. Chen National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan Wen-Hsiang Lu National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan Kuan-Yu He National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan Yao-Sheng Chang National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan Copyright © 2008, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. AbstrAct With the fast growth of the Web, users often suffer from the problem of information overload, since many existing search engines respond to queries with many nonrelevant documents containing query terms based on the conventional search mechanism of keyword matching. In fact, both users and search engine developers had anticipated that this mechanism would reduce information overload by understanding user goals clearly. In this chapter, we will introduce some past research in Web search, and current trends focusing on how to improve the search quality in different perspectives of “what”, “how”, “where”, “when”, and “why”. Additionally, we will also briefy introduce some effective search quality improvements using link-structure-based search algorithms, such as PageRank and HITS. At the end of this chapter, we will introduce the idea of our proposed approach to improving search quality, which employs syntactic structures (verb-object pairs) to automatically identify potential user goals from search-result snippets. We also believe that understanding user goals more clearly and reducing information overload will become one of the major developments in commercial search engines in the future, since the amounts of information and resources continue to increase rapidly, and user needs will become more and more diverse. I NFORMATION S CIENCE P UBLISHING IGR5173 701 E. Chocolate Avenue, Suite 200, Hershey PA 17033-1240, USA Tel: 717/533-8845; Fax 717/533-8661; URL-http://www.igi-global.com This paper appears in the publication, Handbook of Research on Web Information Systems Quality edited by Coral Calero Muñoz, M Angeles Moraga and Mario Piattini © 2008, IGI Global