Web Document Indexing and Retrieval

Abstract

Web Document Indexing is an important part of every Search Engine (SE). Indexing quality has an overwhelming effect on retrieval effectiveness. A document index is a set of terms which show the contents (topic) of the document and helps in distinguishing a given document from other documents in the collection of documents. Small index size can lead to poor results and may miss some relevant items. Large index size allows retrieval of many useful documents along with a significant number of irrelevant ones and decreases the search speed and effectiveness of the searched item. Though the problem has been studied for many years there is still no algorithm to find the optimal index size and sets of index terms. This paper shows how different attributes of the web document (namely Title, Anchor and Emphasize) contribute to the average precision in the process of search. The experiments are done on the WT10g collection of a 1.69-million page corpus.