Web Information Retrieval Author Preprint for Web

Web documents are known as ‘pages’, each of which can be addressed by an identifier called a uniform resource locator (URL). For example: http:// www.acm.org/pubs/contents/proceedings/series/sigir/. Web pages are usually grouped into ‘sites’, sets of pages published together. For example: http://www.acm.org Pages are remarkably versatile. A web page can play the same roles as a news article in a conventional IR corpus, such as providing information for a report or helping to answer a question — indeed these days most news articles are also published as web pages. However, the Web also contains pages of many other types. Many web pages exist purely to help users navigate to other pages in the site, such as the ‘entry page’ or ‘home page’ of a site. Some pages provide an interactive service such as a search form. Some pages provide a commercial service, allowing users to shop for products online. Some pages are generated dynamically and intended to be used once, such as a search engine results list