The Importance of Prior Probabilities for Entry Page Search

An important class of searches on the world-wide-web has the goal to find an entry page (homepage) of an organisation. Entry page search is quite different from Ad Hoc search. Indeed a plain Ad Hoc system performs disappointingly. We explored three non-content features of web pages: page length, number of incoming links and URL form. Especially the URL form proved to be a good predictor. Using URL form priors we found over 70% of all entry pages at rank 1, and up to 89% in the top 10. Non-content features can easily be embedded in a language model framework as a prior probability. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval General Terms Experimentation Keywords Entry Page Search, Prior Probabilities, Links, URLs, Language Models, Parameter Estimation

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Wessel Kraaij, Thijs Westerveld, Djoerd Hiemstra
• Keywords: Entry Page, Entry Page Search, Information Technology, SIGIR 2002, URL Form