Formal definitions of Web information search

Research in Web search engines has been criticized for lacking underlying theories and models. Theories adopted from traditional information retrieval research have been found in many ways lacking and inefficient in dealing with information retrieval in the Web context, primarily because of the amount of information and its dynamic nature, the hyperlinked structure, and multimedia sources. Appropriate Web models and theories for search engines will make web search and information retrieval problems easier to formulate and comprehend. This in turn helps to highlighting holes in current Web search engine techniques. We analyze and categorize previous Web and information retrieval models. Grounded on previous work, we then propose a new Web information retrieval model based on both objective and subjective criteria. The performance of the new model is systematically compared with other IR models, and contributions of this work are highlighted.