Blog site search using resource selection

A blog site consists of many individual blog postings. Current blog search services focus on retrieving postings but there is also a need to identify relevant blog sites. Blog site search is similar to resource selection in distributed information retrieval, in that the target is to find relevant collections of documents. We introduce resource selection techniques for blog site search and evaluate their performance. Further,we propose a "diversity factor" that measures the topic diversity of each blog site. Our results show that the appropriate combination of the resource selection techniques and the diversity factor can achieve significant improvements in retrieval performance compared to baselines. We also report results using these techniques on the TREC blog distillation task.