creators_name: Schonfeld, Uri
creators_name: Shivakumar, Narayanan
type: conference_item
datestamp: 2009-04-06 19:11:37
lastmod: 2009-04-24 08:38:59
metadata_visibility: show
title: Sitemaps: Above and Beyond the Crawl of Duty
ispublished: pub
full_text_status: public
pres_type: paper
abstract: Comprehensive coverage of the public web is crucial to web search engines. Search engines use crawlers to retrieve pages and then discover new ones by extracting the pages’ outgoing links. However, the set of pages reachable from the publicly linked web is estimated to be significantly smaller than the invisible web [5], the set of documents that have no incoming links and can only be retrieved through web applications and web forms. The Sitemaps protocol is a fast-growing web protocol supported jointly by major search engines to help content creators and search engines unlock this hidden data by making it available to search engines. In this paper, we perform a detailed study of how “classic” discovery crawling compares with Sitemaps, in key measures such as coverage and freshness over key representative websites as well as over billions of URLs seen at Google. We observe that Sitemaps and discovery crawling complement each other very well, and offer different tradeoffs. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.3.3: Information Search and Retrieval. General Terms: Experimentation, Algorithms. Keywords: search engines, crawling, sitemaps, metrics, quality.
date: 2009-04
pagerange: 991-991
event_title: 18th International World Wide Web Conference
event_location: Madrid, Spain
event_dates: April 20th-24th, 2009
event_type: conference
refereed: TRUE
citation: Schonfeld, Uri <http://www2009.eprints.org/view/author/Schonfeld=3AUri=3A=3A.html> and Shivakumar, Narayanan <http://www2009.eprints.org/view/author/Shivakumar=3ANarayanan=3A=3A.html> (2009) Sitemaps: Above and Beyond the Crawl of Duty. In: 18th International World Wide Web Conference, April 20th-24th, 2009, Madrid, Spain.
document_url: http://www2009.eprints.org/100/1/p991.pdf
document_url: http://www2009.eprints.org/100/2/WWW2009_Presentation_final_sharable.ppt