“Blending Vertical and Web results: A Case Study using Video Intent” by Damien Lefortier, Pavel Serdyukov, Fedor Romanenko and Maarten de Rijke is available online now.
Modern search engines aggregate results from specialized verticals into the Web search results. We study a setting where vertical and Web results are blended into a single result list, a setting that has not been studied before. We focus on video intent and present a detailed observational study of Yandex’s two video content sources (i.e., the specialized vertical and a subset of the general web index) thus providing insights into their complementary character. By investigating how to blend results from these sources, we contrast traditional federated search and fusion-based approaches with newly proposed approaches that significantly outperform the baseline methods.