Homepage Search in Blog Collections

A blog homepage consists of many individual blog postings. Current blog search services focus on retrieving postings but there is also a need to identify relevant blog homepages. In this paper, we investigate the properties of blog collections and describe the differences between blog homepage searches and general web page searches. We also introduce and evaluate a variety of approaches for blog homepage search. Our results show that noise reduction and the appropriate combination of techniques can achieve significant improvements in retrieval performance compared to a baseline approach and a traditional named page finding approach for general web pages.