Blending Vertical and Web results

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.