A novel method for Query Expansion (QE) was presented in this paper. The proposed method was a hybrid QE technology that combined user relevance feedback and ontology. The proposed method had two significant novelties: it combined user relevance feedback with ontology and used FirteX as the experimental platform. The proposed method was compared with cosine similarity-based QE that was a widely used query expansion technique. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms cosine similarity-based QE 15% and 13% in terms of average precision and average recall and has an improvement of 16% in F-measure.