Homepage Finding and Topic Distillation Using a Common Retrieval Strategy

For the TREC-2002 web track the University of Melbourne experimented with a system designed primarily for topic relevance tasks, and applied it directly to the homepage finding and topic distillation tasks. Our intention was to process queries regardless of their classification, as discriminating information may be unavailable in practice. An integer-valued weighting scheme reported in earlier work was employed, modified to take into account anchor text and many of the metadata fields, but not the URL text, and not the link structure information. Our experiments were carried out using a distributed retrieval system, with data spread across a sixteen node cluster. Indexing and query processing is fast, and the total index size is small.