Title: Improving website search with server log analysis and multiple evidence combination

Authors: Chen Ding, Jin Zhou

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Ryerson University, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, ON M5B 2K3, Canada. ' DB2 Information Management, IBM, 3600 Steeles Avenue East Markham, ON L3R 9Z7, Canada

Abstract: Despite the success of global search engines, website search is still problematic in its retrieval accuracy. Server logs contain a rich source of information about how users actually access a website. In this paper, we propose a novel approach of using server log analysis to extract terms to build the web page representation, which is a new source of evidence for website search. Then, we use multiple evidence combination to combine this log-based evidence with text-based and anchor-based evidence. We test the performance of different combination approaches – the combination of representations and of ranking scores, using linear combination and inference network models. We also consider different baseline retrieval models. Our experimental results have shown that the server log, when used in multiple evidence combination, can improve the effectiveness of website search, whereas the impact on different models is different.

Keywords: multiple evidence combination; server log analysis; website search; information retrieval; retrieval accuracy; server logs; web page representations; ranking scores.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWGS.2007.014071

International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 2007 Vol.3 No.2, pp.103 - 127

Published online: 17 Jun 2007 *

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