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Most Influential SIGIR 2002 Paper · 2026-03 edition

The Importance Of Prior Probabilities For Entry Page Search

Wessel Kraaij; Thijs Westerveld; Djoerd Hiemstra

Venue
ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR) 2002
Recognition
Most Influential SIGIR 2002 Paper (Rank No. 9)
Edition
2026-03
Impact factor
6
Certificate ID
a086b808e80d94f3

Abstract

An important class of searches on the world-wide-web has the goal to find an entry page (homepage) of an organisation. Entry page search is quite different from Ad Hoc search. Indeed a plain Ad Hoc system performs disappointingly. We explored three non-content features of web pages: page length, number of incoming links and URL form. Especially the URL form proved to be a good predictor. Using URL form priors we found over 70% of all entry pages at rank 1, and up to 89% in the top 10. Non-content features can easily be embedded in a language model framework as a prior probability.

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