Title: On the Applicability of Delicious for Temporal Search on Web Archives,
Abstract: Web archives are large longitudinal collections that store webpages from the
past, which might be missing on the current live Web. Consequently, temporal
search over such collections is essential for finding prominent missing
webpages and tasks like historical analysis. However, this has been challenging
due to the lack of popularity information and proper ground truth to evaluate
temporal retrieval models. In this paper we investigate the applicability of
external longitudinal resources to identify important and popular websites in
the past and analyze the social bookmarking service Delicious for this purpose.
The timestamped bookmarks on Delicious provide explicit cues about popular
time periods in the past along with relevant descriptors. These are valuable to
identify important documents in the past for a given temporal query. Focusing
purely on recall, we analyzed more than 12,000 queries and find that using
Delicious yields average recall values from 46% up to 100%, when limiting
ourselves to the best represented queries in the considered dataset. This
constitutes an attractive and low-overhead approach for quick access into Web
archives by not dealing with the actual contents.