A Novel Term Weighing Scheme Towards Efficient Crawl of Textual Databases (1311.0339v1)

Abstract: The Hidden Web is the vast repository of informational databases available only through search form interfaces, accessible by therein typing a set of keywords in the search forms. Typically, a Hidden Web crawler is employed to autonomously discover and download pages from the Hidden Web. Traditional hidden web crawlers do not provide the search engines with an optimal search experience because of the excessive number of search requests posed through the form interface so as to exhaustively crawl and retrieve the contents of the target hidden web database. Here in our work, we provide a framework to investigate the problem of optimal search and curtail it by proposing an effective query term selection approach based on the frequency & distribution of terms in the document database. The paper focuses on developing a term-weighing scheme called VarDF (acronym for variable document frequency) that can ease the identification of optimal terms to be used as queries on the interface for maximizing the achieved coverage of the crawler which in turn will facilitate the search engine to have a diversified and expanded index. We experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on a manually created database of documents in the area of Information Retrieval.