Research in the area of adversarial information retrieval has been facilitated by the availability of the UK-2006/UK-2007 collections, comprising crawl data, link graph, and spam labels. However, research into nullifying the negative effect of spam or ...

Keywords: evaluation, test collections, web spam

The problem of low-quality information on the Web is nowhere more important than in the domain of health, where unsound information and misleading advice can have serious consequences. The quality of health web sites can be rated by subject experts against ...

Keywords: Health portal search, Quality filtering of search results

Since Google became a celebrity in the early noughties, many people with the power to control and direct research resources have taken the view that there is no more research to be done on the problem of information retrieval. In reality, there are so ...

Many current evaluation techniques for information retrieval, such as test collections and simulations, are difficult to apply in situations where queries and preferred results are context-dependent. This is particularly true in personal metasearch applications, ...

In real world use of test collection methods, it is essential that the query test set be representative of the work load expected in the actual application. Using a random sample of queries from a media company's query log as a 'gold standard' test set ...

Keywords: information retrieval evaluation, query sampling

The presentation of query biased document snippets as part of results pages presented by search engines has become an expectation of search engine users. In this paper we explore the algorithms and data structures required as part of a search engine ...

Keywords: document caching, snippet generation, web summaries

Many server selection methods suitable for distributed information retrieval applications rely, in the absence of cooperation, on the availability of unbiased samples of documents from the constituent collections. We describe a number of sampling methods ...

Keywords: distributed information retrieval, random sampling

It has been claimed that topic metadata can be used to improve the accuracy of text searches. Here, we test this claim by examining the contribution of metadata to effective searching within Web sites published by a university with a strong commitment ...

Document level security (DLS) -- enforcing permissions prevailing at the time of search -- is specified as a mandatory requirement in many enterprise search applications. Unfortunately, depending upon implementation details and values of key parameters, ...

Keywords: access control, caching, collection level security, document level security, enterprise search, file systems, performance, scalability, security models

Familiar evaluation methodologies for information retrieval (IR) are not well suited to the task of comparing systems in many real settings. These systems and evaluation methods must support contextual, interactive retrieval over changing, heterogeneous ...

Keywords: embedded comparisons, evaluation