On the temporal dimension of search

Abstract

Web search is probably the single most important application on the Internet. The most famous search techniques are perhaps the PageRank and HITS algorithms. These algorithms are motivated by the observation that a hyperlink from a page to another is an implicit conveyance of authority to the target page. They exploit this social phenomenon to identify quality pages, e.g., "authority" pages and "hub" pages. In this paper we argue that these algorithms miss an important dimension of the Web, the temporal dimension. The Web is not a static environment. It changes constantly. Quality pages in the past may not be quality pages now or in the future. These techniques favor older pages because these pages have many in-links accumulated over time. New pages, which may be of high quality, have few or no inlinks and are left behind. Bringing new and quality pages to users is important because most users want the latest information. Research publication search has exactly the same problem. This paper studies the temporal dimension of search in the context of research publication search. We propose a number of methods deal with the problem. Our experimental results show that these methods are highly effective.