Query suggestions to help explore new topics

As a graduate student, I often had to find and read papers for my courses – usually in areas that I wasn’t familiar with. Google Scholar had already made it possible to find papers in all areas of research and the key challenge was to find the right keywords to search for. And then, when I joined the Scholar team, I had to quickly come up to speed with yet more research fields.

Today, we are launching query suggestions to help users explore topics they may not be familiar with. When you do a query, the results page may also include related search queries to help you  explore different directions within your topic of interest. Query suggestions appear after search results.

For example, see  [antiparkinson]. As Wikipedia mentions, antiparkinson medications are used to treat/relieve the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. The suggested queries span several directions:

• commonly used drugs – [antiparkinson levodopa], [antiparkinson agonist]
• drug interactions – [antiparkinson neuroleptics], [antiparkinson antipsychotics]
• how these medications function – [antiparkinson mechanism of action], [antiparkinson actions],[antiparkinson pharmacology], [antiparkinson bioassay]
• effects – [antiparkinson side effects], [antiparkinson withdrawal]
• treatment issues – [antiparkinson adherence]
• potential natural substance – [antiparkinson turmeric]

Query suggestions span all broad areas of research. For example, see [gps antenna], [prions], [vaccination], [drug-eluting stents], [estoppel], [conformal field theory], [distributed database], [optimal stopping problem].

I wish I had access to something like this when I started working on query suggestions. Being able to quickly explore topics like [collocations], [language model] and [syntactic parsing] would have helped quite a bit…

As yet, query suggestions are available for selected English queries. We plan to expand the coverage to more languages and queries.

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