<information science> Adding search terms to a user's search.
Query expansion is the process of a search engine adding search
terms to a user's weighted search. The intent is to improve
precision and/or recall. The additional terms may be taken from
a thesaurus. For example a search for "car" may be expanded to:
car cars auto autos automobile automobiles. The additional terms
may also be taken from documents that the user has specified as
being relevant; this is the basis for the "more like this"
feature of some search engines. The extra terms can have
positive or negative weights. Try this search on Wikipedia,
OneLook, Google Nearby terms: QUEL « query « Query By Example «
query expansion » ques » Quest » question mark