Background The explosion of the World Wide Web (more commonly referred to as the Web) as an important information source has moulded the behaviour of many information seekers and consumers [1,2,3]. With such a popularity of the Web, a new discipline based on the concepts of traditional information retrieval (IR), called the Web information retrieval (WebIR) has been created; many innovative ones have also been introduced. In 1999, the Web was estimated to have only one–two billion publicly accessible pages, but was growing exponentially. Search systems, primarily viewed as tools for topical research, are now often used in a growing number of tasks, including navigation and shopping assistance. A s more and more users are relying on the Internet for information, search engines have emerged as a handy tool for information retrieval. This is clearly apparent on the World Wide Web, where the growth of available information
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