TS-LocalRank: A topic similarity local ranking algorithm for re-ranking web search results

Abstract

This paper proposes a variant of the PageRank algorithm to apply for re-ranking web search results. The algorithm (named TS-LocalRank) obtains top N pages from search results of a major search engine, assigns a local rank to each page based on the topic similarity between the web pages, re-orders the web pages, and presents the results to users. The objectives of this algorithm are (i) to assign a high local rank to the web pages which are most relevant to user query, and (ii) to minimize the Mean Absolute Deviation of the similarity between web pages in top search results.