Overview of the TREC 2013 Federated Web Search Track ( draft )

The goal of the TREC Federated Web Search track is to promote research related to federated search, in a realistic web setting. This overview paper discusses the main results of the FedWeb 2013 track. In this first year of the track, we focused on basic challenges in federated search: (1) resource selection, and (2) results merging. After an overview of the provided data collection and the relevance judgments for the test topics, the participants’ individual results on both tasks are discused, focusing on global trends and promising research directions.