  Search engines today present results that are often oblivious to abrupt
shifts in intent. For example, the query `independence day' usually refers to a
US holiday, but the intent of this query abruptly changed during the release of
a major film by that name. While no studies exactly quantify the magnitude of
intent-shifting traffic, studies suggest that news events, seasonal topics, pop
culture, etc account for 50% of all search queries. This paper shows that the
signals a search engine receives can be used to both determine that a shift in
intent has happened, as well as find a result that is now more relevant. We
present a meta-algorithm that marries a classifier with a bandit algorithm to
achieve regret that depends logarithmically on the number of query impressions,
under certain assumptions. We provide strong evidence that this regret is close
to the best achievable. Finally, via a series of experiments, we demonstrate
that our algorithm outperforms prior approaches, particularly as the amount of
intent-shifting traffic increases.
