Overview of the TREC 2014 Federated Web Search Track

by Thomas Demeester, Dolf Trieschnigg, Dong Nguyen, Ke Zhou, and Djoerd Hiemstra

The TREC Federated Web Search track facilitates research in topics related to federated web search, by providing a large realistic data collection sampled from a multitude of online search engines. The FedWeb 2013 challenges of Resource Selection and Results Merging challenges are again included in FedWeb 2014, and we additionally introduced the task of vertical selection. Other new aspects are the required link between the Resource Selection and Results Merging, and the importance of diversity in the merged results. After an overview of the new data collection and relevance judgments, the individual participants' results for the tasks are introduced, analyzed, and compared.

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Presented at the 23rd Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) in Gaithersburg, USA