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Due to the dynamic nature of web and the complex architectures of modern commercial search engines, top results in major search engines can change dramatically over time. Our experimental data shows that, for all three major search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo!), approximately 90% of queries have their top 10 results altered within a period of ten days. Although this instability is expected in...
We develop an abstract model of information acquisition from redundant data. We assume a random sampling process from data which contain information with bias and are interested in the fraction of information we expect to learn as function of (i) the sampled fraction (recall) and (ii) varying bias of information (redundancy distributions). We develop two rules of thumb with varying robustness. We...
We investigated to what extent users could be satisfied by a web search engine for answering causal questions. We used an assessment environment in which a web search interface was simulated. For 1 401 why-queries from a search engine log we pre-retrieved the first 10 results using Bing. 311 queries were assessed by human judges. We found that even without clicking a result, 25.2% of the why-questions...
We present a study of the contributions of three classes of ranking signals: BM25F, a retrieval function that is based on words in the content of web pages and the anchors that link to them; SALSA, a link-based feature that takes all or part of the result set to a query as input; and matching-anchor count (MAC), a feature that measures precise matches between queries and anchors pointing to result...
The User-over-Ranking hypothesis states that rather the user herself than a web search engine’s ranking algorithm can help to improve retrieval performance. The means are longer queries that provide additional keywords. Readers who take this hypothesis for granted should recall the fact that virtually no user and none of the search index providers consider its implications. For readers who...
Result caches are vital for efficiency of search engines. In this work, we propose a novel caching strategy in which a dynamic result cache is split into two layers: an HTML cache and a docID cache. The HTML cache in the first layer stores the result pages computed for queries. The docID cache in the second layer stores ids of documents in search results. Experiments under various scenarios show that,...
Set the date range to filter the displayed results. You can set a starting date, ending date or both. You can enter the dates manually or choose them from the calendar.