Document keyphrases as subject metadata: Incorporating document key concepts in search results

Most search engines display some document metadata, such as title, snippet and URL, in conjunction with the returned hits to aid users in determining documents. However, metadata is usually fragmented pieces of information that, even when combined, does not provide an overview of a returned document. In this paper, we propose a mechanism of enriching metadata of the returned results by incorporating automatically extracted document keyphrases with each returned hit. We hypothesize that keyphrases of a document can better represent the major theme in that document. Therefore, by examining the keyphrases in each returned hit, users can better predict the content of documents and the time spent on downloading and examining the irrelevant documents will be reduced substantially.