Towards Information Retrieval Evaluation over Web Archives

We present the rst overview of a web archive user prole and the searching technology that supports it. Most web archives only support URL search and just a few provide fulltext search in response to users’ expectations. Their technology is essentially based on web search engines, which ignore the temporal dimension of collections. As consequence, the quality of results is poor. We suggest the creation of an initiative for information retrieval evaluation, meeting the needs of web archives. We believe this initiative would foster research in web archives, in resemblance with what other initiatives achieved in their domains.