Server selection methods in hybrid portal search

The TREC .GOV collection makes a valuable web testbed for distributed information retrieval methods because it is naturally partitioned and includes 725 web-oriented queries with judged answers. It can usefully model aspects of government and large corporate portals. Analysis of the .gov data shows that a purely distributed approach would not be feasible for providing search on a .gov portal because of the large number (17,000+) of web sites and the high proportion that do not provide a search interface. An alternative hybrid approach, combining both distributed and centralized techniques, is proposed and server selection methods are evaluated within this framework using web-oriented evaluation methodology. A number of well-known algorithms are compared against representatives (highest anchor ranked page (HARP) and anchor weighted sum (AWSUM)) of a family of new selection methods which use link anchortext extracted from an auxiliary crawl to provide descriptions of sites which are not...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: David Hawking, Paul Thomas
• Keywords: Information Retrieval Methods, Selection Methods, SIGIR 2005, Topic Distillation