Improved relevance ranking in WebGather

The amount of information on the web is growing rapidly, and search engines that rely on keyword matching usually return too many low quality matches. To improve search results, a challenging task for search engines is how to effectively calculate a relevance ranking for each web page. This paper discusses in what order a search engine should return the URLs it has produced in response to a user’s query, so as to show more relevant pages first. Emphasis is given on the ranking functions adopted by WebGather that take link structure and user popularity factors into account. Experimental results are also presented to evaluate the proposed strategy.