Replicating Web Structure in Small-Scale Test Collections

Linkage analysis as an aid to web search has been assumed to be of significant benefit and we know that it is being implemented by many major Search Engines. Why then have few TREC participants been able to scientifically prove the benefits of linkage analysis in recent years? In this paper we put forward reasons why many disappointing results have been found in TREC experiments and we identify the linkage density requirements of a dataset to faithfully support experiments into linkage-based retrieval by examining the linkage structure of the WWW. Based on these requirements we report on methodologies for synthesising such a test collection.