A topic-specific web search system focusing on quality pages

Abstract

We describe a topic-specific Web search system focused on quality pages and argue that there is a need for such quality-based topic-specific search tools. The first implementation of the search system is available on the Web and it deals with climate change. The key idea is to crawl (using a focused crawling technique) in known trusted sites and in sites that are connected to them. We also discuss the further development of the system and our future research. Our project plan involves building a larger quality-based Web search system dealing with many globally significant topics (in addition to climate change). © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.