LAUSR

Abstract Web users are not assured that the results provided by Web search engines or recommender systems are either exhaustive, or even the most relevant to their search needs. Businesses that provide services through the web have a commercial interest to rank higher on results or recommendations to attract more customers, while Web search engines and recommender systems make a profit based on the advertisers that can offer a higher payment for their advertisements. Thus we propose a neuro-computing application that addresses these issues from the perspective of end-users. We present an Intelligent Search Assistant (ISA) that acts as an interface between the user and different search engines. Using the Random Neural Network as a learning engine that operates with learned by gradient descent and reinforcement learning, the ISA learns how to reorder results and present them to the end-user, according to the perceived relevance of the results for the end-user's benefit. We also present a new relevance metric, which combines both relevance and rank, to validate and compare the performance of our proposed solution against other Web search engines and recommender systems. The resulting rank relevance provided by different Web search engines, metasearch engines, academic databases and recommender systems are compared with the ISA, which appears to outperform commercial search tools.