Marti A. Hearst

Research: Cha-Cha Search

The Cha-Cha Search Engine was a UC Berkeley iSchool and CS research project. The project ran a search engine over the UC Berkeley Intranet from 1997 - 2006.

The goal of the project was to organize web search results in such a way as to reflect the underlying structure of the intranet. The Cha-Cha system produced an "outline" or "table of contents" by recording the shortest paths in hyperlinks from root pages to every page within the web intranet. After the user issued a query, these shortest paths were dynamically combined to form a hierarchical outline of the context in which the search results occurred.

Sample screenshots:

• Search on seaborg (first page of results)
• Search on seaborg (second page)
• Search on diversity (first page of results)
• Search on diversity (second page)
• Search on diversity (third page)
• Search on hearst (first page of results)
• Search on hearst (second page)

Publications

• Chen, M., Hearst, M., Hong, J., and Lin, J. Cha-Cha: A System for Organizing Intranet Search Results in the Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and SYSTEMS (USITS), Boulder, CO, October 11-14, 1999. html pdf

The Cha-Cha research effort benefited from a generous donation from Sun Microsystems of a Sun Enterprise 450.