The Importance of Prior Probabilities for Entry Page Search

  • Authors:
  • Wessel Kraaij;Thijs Westerveld;Djoerd Hiemstra

  • Affiliations:
  • TNO TPD, The Netherlands;University of Twente;University of Twente

  • Venue:
  • SIGIR '02 Proceedings of the 25th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2002

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

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.