Improving the Evaluation of Web Search Systems

Linkage analysis as an aid to web search has been assumed to be of significant benefit and we know that it is being implemented by many major Search Engines. Why then have few TREC participants been able to scientifically prove the benefits of linkage analysis over the past three years? In this paper we put forward reasons why disappointing results have been found and we identify the linkage density requirements of a dataset to faithfully support experiments into linkage analysis. We also report a series of linkagebased retrieval experiments on a more densely linked dataset culled from the TREC web documents.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ECIR
• Authors: Cathal Gurrin, Alan F. Smeaton
• Keywords: ECIR 2003, Information Technology, Linkage Analysis, Linkage Density Requirements, TREC Participants