The massive acceptance and usage of the blog communities by a significant portion of the Web users has rendered knowledge extraction from blogs a particularly important research field. One of the most interesting related problems is the issue of the opinionated retrieval, that is, the retrieval of blog entries which contain opinions about a topic. There has been a remarkable amount of work towards the improvement of the effectiveness of the opinion retrieval systems. The primary objective of these systems is to retrieve blog posts which are both relevant to a given query and contain opinions, and generate a ranked list of the retrieved documents according to the relevance and opinion scores. Although a wide variety of effective opinion retrieval methods have been proposed, to the best of our knowledge, none of them takes into consideration the issue of the importance of the retrieved opinions. In this work we introduce a ranking model which combines the existing retrieval strategies with query-independent information to enhance the ranking of the opinionated documents. More specifically, our model accounts for the influence of the blogger who authored an opinion, the reputation of the blog site which published a specific blog post, and the impact of the post itself. Furthermore, we expand the current proximity-based opinion scoring strategies by considering the physical locations of the query and opinion terms within a document. We conduct extensive experiments with the TREC Blogs08 dataset which demonstrate that the application of our methods enhances retrieval precision by a significant margin
