Can We Find Documents in Web Archives without Knowing their Contents?
This work addresses the challenge of accessing large, redundant web archives for researchers and archivists, but it is incremental as it builds on existing search methods by focusing on metadata.
The paper tackles the problem of searching web archives without using document content by analyzing ranking strategies based on metadata like file headers, links, and URLs, and proposes a learning model that effectively distinguishes good from bad search results, showing promising results in empirical tests.
Recent advances of preservation technologies have led to an increasing number of Web archive systems and collections. These collections are valuable to explore the past of the Web, but their value can only be uncovered with effective access and exploration mechanisms. Ideal search and rank- ing methods must be robust to the high redundancy and the temporal noise of contents, as well as scalable to the huge amount of data archived. Despite several attempts in Web archive search, facilitating access to Web archive still remains a challenging problem. In this work, we conduct a first analysis on different ranking strategies that exploit evidences from metadata instead of the full content of documents. We perform a first study to compare the usefulness of non-content evidences to Web archive search, where the evidences are mined from the metadata of file headers, links and URL strings only. Based on these findings, we propose a simple yet surprisingly effective learning model that combines multiple evidences to distinguish "good" from "bad" search results. We conduct empirical experiments quantitatively as well as qualitatively to confirm the validity of our proposed method, as a first step towards better ranking in Web archives taking meta- data into account.