Data cleansing for Web information retrieval using query independent features

Understanding what kinds of Web pages are the most useful for Web search engine users is a critical task in Web information retrieval (IR). Most previous works used hyperlink analysis algorithms to solve this problem. However, little research has been focused on query‐independent Web data cleansing for Web IR. In this paper, we first provide analysis of the differences between retrieval target pages and ordinary ones based on more than 30 million Web pages obtained from both the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) and a widely used Chinese search engine, SOGOU (www.sogou.com). We further propose a learning‐based data cleansing algorithm for reducing Web pages that are unlikely to be useful for user requests. We found that there exists a large proportion of low‐quality Web pages in both the English and the Chinese Web page corpus, and retrieval target pages can be identified using query‐independent features and cleansing algorithms. The experimental results showed that our algorithm is effective in reducing a large portion of Web pages with a small loss in retrieval target pages. It makes it possible for Web IR tools to meet a large fraction of users' needs with only a small part of pages on the Web. These results may help Web search engines make better use of their limited storage and computation resources to improve search performance.