An Improved Approach to Ranking Web Documents

Ranking thousands of web documents so that they are matched in response to a user query is really a challenging task. For this purpose, search engines use different ranking mechanisms on apparently related resultant web documents to decide the order in which documents should be displayed. Existing ranking mechanisms decide on the order of a web page based on the amount and popularity of the links pointed to and emerging from it. Sometime search engines result in placing less relevant documents in the top positions in response to a user query. There is a strong need to improve the ranking strategy. In this paper, a novel ranking mechanism is being proposed to rank the web documents that consider both the HTML structure of a page and the contextual senses of keywords that are present within it and its back-links. The approach has been tested on data sets of URLs and on their back-links in relation to different topics. The experimental result shows that the overall search results, in response to user queries, are improved. The ordering of the links that have been obtained is compared with the ordering that has been done by using the page rank score. The results obtained thereafter shows that the proposed mechanism contextually puts more related web pages in the top order, as compared to the page rank score. Keywords—Ranking, Ordering, WWW, Information Retrieval, Contextual Relevance, Contextual Sense, Web Documents