Computing block importance for searching on web sites

Abstract

In this paper we consider the problem of using the block structure of a Web page to improve ranking results when searching for information on Web sites. Given the block structure of the Web pages as input, we propose a method for computing the importance of each block (in the form of block weights) in a Web collection. As we show through experiments, the deployment of our method may allow a significant improvement in the quality of search results. We ran experiments to compare the quality of search results when using our method to the quality obtained when using no structure information. When compared to a ranking method that considered pages as monolithic units, our block-based ranking method led to improvements in the quality of search results in experiments with two sites with heterogeneous structures. Further, our method does not increase the cost of processing queries when compared to the systems using no structural information.