Synonyms
Ranking; Result ranking; Search ranking
Definition
Web search engines return lists of web pages sorted by the page’s relevance to the user query. The problem with web search relevance ranking is to estimate relevance of a page to a query. Nowadays, commercial web-page search engines combine hundreds of features to estimate relevance. The specific features and their mode of combination are kept secret to fight spammers and competitors. Nevertheless, the main types of features at use, as well as the methods for their combination, are publicly known and are the subject of scientific investigation.
Historical Background
Information Retrieval (IR) Systems are the predecessors of Web and search engines. These systems were designed to retrieve documents in curated digital collections such as library abstracts, corporate documents, news, etc. Traditionally, IR relevance ranking algorithms were designed to obtain high recall on medium-sized document collections using long detailed...
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Zaragoza, H., Najork, M. (2018). Web Search Relevance Ranking. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_463
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_463
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