Thesis (M.S.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science (Computer Science), 2005. / Includes bibliographical references.

This research is an integral part of the effort aimed at overcoming the limitations of the classic search engines. This thesis is concerned with the investigation of the impact of different modes of mediation on the web search process. Conceptually, it is divided into three main parts. The first part details the investigation of methods and mechanisms in user profile generation and in filtering search results. The second part deals with the presentation of an approach and its application in the development of a mediation framework between the user and the classic Web Search engines. This involved the integration of the explicit, implicit and hybrid modes of mediation within a content-based method, and was facilitated by the adoption of the Vector Space Model. The third part presents an extensive comparative evaluation of the impact of the different types of mediation systems on web search, in terms of precision, recall and F-measure. The thesis concludes by identifying the contribution of the research programme and the satisfaction of the stated objectives.