Topic distillation via sub-site retrieval

Topic distillation is one of the main information needs when users search the Web. Previous approaches for topic distillation treat single page as the basic searching unit, which has not fully utilized the structure information of the Web. In this paper, we propose a novel concept for topic distillation, named sub-site retrieval, in which the basic searching unit is sub-site instead of single page. A sub-site is the subset of a website, consisting of a structural collection of pages. The key of sub-site retrieval includes (1) extracting effective features for the representation of a sub-site using both the content and structure information, (2) delivering the sub-site-based retrieval results with a friendly and informative user interface. For the first point, we propose Punished Integration algorithm, which is based on the modeling of the growth of websites. For the second point, we design a user interface to better illustrate the search results of sub-site retrieval. Testing on the topic distillation task of TREC 2003 and 2004, sub-site retrieval leads to significant improvement of retrieval performance over the previous methods based on single pages. Furthermore, time complexity analysis shows that sub-site retrieval can be integrated into the index component of search engines. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.