Abstract

Abstract: Recency ranking refers to the ranking of web results by accounting for both relevance and freshness. This is particularly important for "recency sensitive" queries such as breaking news queries. In this study, we propose a set of novel click features to improve machine learned recency ranking. Rather than computing simple aggregate click through rates, we derive these features using the temporal click through data and query reformulation chains. One of the features that we use is click buzz that captures the spiking interest of a url for a query. We also propose time weighted click through rates which treat recent observations as being exponentially more important. The promotion of fresh content is typically determined by the query intent which can change dynamically over time. Quite often users query reformulations convey clues about the query's intent. Hence we enrich our click features by following query reformulations which typically benefit the first query in the chain of reformulations. Our experiments show these novel features can improve the NDCG5 of a major online search engine's ranking for "recency sensitive" queries by up to 1.57%. This is one of the very few studies that exploits temporal click through data and query reformulations for recency ranking. Download: Aaai10 recencyfeature 2.pdf ACM COPYRIGHT NOTICE. Copyright © 2012 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org.