Temporal Anchor Text as Proxy for Real User Queries

Web archives preserve the fast changing web. While we can archive the web pages, the popularity of queries in the past has usually not been preserved. Previous studies have observed the importance of anchor text for improving the quality of text search, and have shown that anchor text is similar to real user queries and documents titles. Other studies have shown that documents titles are similar to the real user queries. In this paper, we propose an approach to reconstruct the information that would be provided by query log in the past using temporal anchor text. First, we study the link graph of four years of Web archive in order to show how the target hosts and anchor text evolve over time. Second, we investigate the importance of anchor text over time. Our approach is to rank anchor text based on their popularity in the archive at specific time. Then, we check the importance of the top ranked anchor text in the public Web at the same time. In order to achieve this, we used the WikiStats dataset which aggregates page views of Wikipedia pages. Using exact string matching between top ranked anchor text and Wikipedia titles in the WikiStats dataset, we find a high percentage of overlap (approximately 57%). Our data strengthens the hypothesis that anchor text may be used as a proxy for actual query volume.