Overview of the TREC-2001 Web track

TREC-2001 saw the falling into abeyance of the Large Web Task but a strengthening and broadening of activities based on the 1.69 million page WTlOg corpus. There were two tasks. The topic relevance task was like traditional TREC ad hoc but used queries taken from real web search logs from which description and narrative fields of a topic description were inferred by the topic developers. There were 50 topics. In the homepage finding task queries corresponded to the name of an entity whose home page (site entry page) was included in WTlOg. The challenge in this task was to return all of the homepages at the very top of the ranking. Cursory analysis suggests that once again, exploitation of link information did not help on the topic relevance task. By contrast, in the homepage finding task, the best performing run which did not make use of either link information or properties of the document's URL achieved only half of the mean reciprocal rank of the best run.