218 Int. J. Web Science, Vol. 2, No. 4, 2014 Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Automatic discovery and ranking of synonyms for search keywords in the web K.C. Srikantaiah*, M.S. Roopa, N. Krishna Kumar and K.R. Venugopal Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering, Bangalore University, Bangalore, India Email: srikantaiahkc@gmail.com Email: roopams22@gmail.com Email: krishnakumarn@live.com Email: venugopalkr@gmail.com *Corresponding author L.M. Patnaik DESE, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India Email: patnaiklm@yahoo.com Abstract: Search engines are an indispensable part of a web user’s life. A vast majority of these web users experience difficulties caused by the keyword-based search engines such as inaccurate results for queries and irrelevant URLs even though the given keyword is present in them. Also, relevant URLs may be lost as they may have the synonym of the keyword and not the original one. This condition is known as the polysemy problem. To alleviate these problems, we propose an algorithm called automatic discovery and ranking of synonyms for search keywords in the web (ADRS). The proposed method generates a list of candidate synonyms for individual keywords by employing the relevance factor of the URLs associated with the synonyms. Then, ranking of these candidate synonyms is done using co-occurrence frequencies and various page count-based measures. One of the major advantages of our algorithm is that it is highly scalable which makes it applicable to online data on the dynamic, domain-independent and unstructured World Wide Web. The experimental results show that the best results are obtained using the proposed algorithm with WebJaccard. Keywords: candidate synonym; hyperlink; inbound anchor text; ranking; search engine; similarity measures. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Srikantaiah, K.C., Roopa, M.S., Krishna Kumar, N., Venugopal, K.R. and Patnaik, L.M. (2014) ‘Automatic discovery and ranking of synonyms for search keywords in the web’, Int. J. Web Science, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp.218–236.