The Web is comprised of a vast quantity of text. Modern search engines struggle to index it independent of the structure of queries and type of Web data, and commonly use indexing based on Web‘s graph structure to identify high-quality relevant pages. However, despite the apparent widespread use of these algorithms, Web indexing based on human feedback and document content is controversial. There are many fundamental questions that need to be addressed, including: How many types of domains/websites are there in the Web? What type of data is in each type of domain? For each type, which segments/HTML fields in the documents are most useful? What are the relationships between the segments? How can web content be indexed efficiently in all forms of document configurations? Our investigation of these questions has led to a novel way to use Wikipedia to find the relationships between the query structures and document configurations throughout the document indexing process and to use them to build an efficient index that allows fast indexing and searching, and optimizes the retrieval of highly relevant results. We consider the top page on the ranked list to be highly important in determining the types of queries. Our aim is to design a powerful search engine with a strong focus on how to make the first page highly relevant to the user, and on how to retrieve other pages based on that first page. Through processing the user query using the Wikipedia index and determining the type of the query, our approach could trace the path of a query in our index, and retrieve specific results for each type.
We use two kinds of data to increase the relevancy and efficiency of the ranked results: offline and real-time. Traditional search engines find it difficult to use these two kinds of data together, because building a real-time index from social data and integrating it with the index for the offline data is difficult in a traditional distributed index.
As a source of offline data, we use data from the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) evaluation campaign. The web track at TREC offers researchers chance to investigate different retrieval approaches for web indexing and searching. The crawled offline dataset makes it possible to design powerful search engines that extends current methods and to evaluate and compare them.
We propose a new indexing method, based on the structures of the queries and the content of documents. Our search engine uses a core index for offline data and a hash index for real-time
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data, which leads to improved performance. The TREC Web track evaluation of our experiments showed that our approach can be successfully employed for different types of queries. We evaluated our search engine on different sets of queries from TREC 2010, 2011 and 2012 Web tracks. Our approach achieved very good results in the TREC 2010 training queries. In the TREC 2011 testing queries, our approach was one of the six best compared to all other approaches (including those that used a very large corpus of 500 million documents), and it was second best when compared to approaches that used only part of the corpus (50 million documents), as ours did. In the TREC 2012 testing queries, our approach was second best if compared to all the approaches, and first if compared only to systems that used the subset of 50 million documents.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/31773 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Al-Akashi, Falah Hassan Ali |
| Contributors | Inkpen, Diana |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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