Two selfless contributions to web search evaluation

We present our results for the Web Search track and the Federated Web Search track for the 23rd Text Retrieval Conference TREC

Overview of the TREC 2013 Federated Web Search Track

The TREC Federated Web Search track is intended to promote research related to federated search in a realistic web setting, and hereto provides a large data collection gathered from a series of online search engines. This overview paper discusses the results of the first edition of the track, FedWeb 2013. The focus was on basic challenges in federated search: (1) resource selection, and (2) results merging. After an overview of the provided data collection and the relevance judgments for the test topics, the participants’ individual approaches and results on both tasks are discussed. Promising research directions and an outlook on the 2014 edition of the track are provided as well

Mirex and Taily at TREC 2013

We describe the participation of the Lowlands at the Web Track and the FedWeb track of TREC 2013. For the Web Track we used the Mirex Map-Reduce library with out-of-the- box approaches and for the FedWeb Track we adapted our shard selection method Taily for resource selection. Here, our results were above median and close to the maximum performance achieved