An analysis on topic features and difficulties based on web navigational retrieval experiments

Abstract

We analyze the relationship between topic features and difficulties in Web navigational retrieval tasks based on the experiments done on the NTCIR-5 Web test collection. Our analysis shows that the difficulties of a retrieval task are closely related to the specificity of the topic, and topics that are of some particular categories are more difficult than others. For example, a representative page of a company or an organization is easier on average to find than that of a person, a product, or an event. Our results show that adding metadata on a topic would potentially be useful for search engines to predict the difficulty of the task. Additionally, we show that the number of unique documents retrieved from different systems weakly correlates with the query's performance. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.