SEARCH QUERY OBFUSCATION VIA BROADENED SUBQUERIES AND RECOMBINING

• US 20150100564A1
• Filed: 12/12/2014
• Published: 04/09/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 07/31/2013
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Clark, Adam T., Cragun, Brian J., Petri, John E.
• Granted Patent: US 9,721,023 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/709
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/24535 of sub-queries or views
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/3338 Query expansion
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/367 Ontology
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9535 Search customisation based on user profiles and personalisation

Abstract

System, method, and computer program product to perform an operation to obfuscate search queries via broadened subqueries and recombining, by referencing an ontology to identify a set of generalized terms corresponding to at least one term of a received query, generating a plurality of subqueries based on the received query and the set of generalized terms, executing each of the plurality of subqueries to retrieve a result set for each respective subquery, and filtering the result sets using the received query to produce a result set responsive to the received query.

Claims

1. A method, comprising:

referencing an ontology to identify a set of generalized terms corresponding to at least one term of a received query;

generating a plurality of subqueries based on the received query and the set of generalized terms;

executing each of the plurality of subqueries to retrieve a result set for each respective subquery; and

filtering the result sets using the received query and by operation of one or more computer processors to produce a result set responsive to the received query.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein each subquery includes at least one of:

(i) at least one generalized term of the set of generalized terms, and (ii) a subset of terms of the at least one term of the received query, wherein the plurality of subqueries are generated responsive to user input specifying to generate the subqueries, wherein the method further comprises;

merging the result sets after executing each of the plurality of subqueries.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein at least two subqueries of the plurality of subqueries are executed on different search engines.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein each subquery does not include the at least one term corresponding to the at least one generalized term.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein generating the plurality of subqueries further comprises:

identifying a sensitive term in the query; and

composing the plurality of queries without using the sensitive term.

6. The method of claim 5, wherein the sensitive term is identified by at least one of:

(i) user input, (ii) determining that an inverse document frequency (IDF) of the sensitive term in a corpus exceeds a predefined frequency threshold, (iii) the sensitive term being included in a list of predefined sensitive terms, (iv) determining that the sensitive term is a low level node of the ontology.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein a first subquery and a second subquery, of the plurality of subqueries, are constructed to offset broadness in the first subquery with specificity in the second subquery.