Nick Craswell I am an Applied Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge. I'm in the Machine Learning and Perception group, in the area of Information Retrieval. I also work for Live Search. News: Web Search Click Data 2009 is a workshop held in conjunction with WSDM2009 in Barcelona, February 2009. Click data avilable.

Research Overview I am interested in Web search evaluation, mostly on enterprise-scale webs but also the World Wide Web. I built the VLC, VLC2, WT2g and .GOV test collections, which have been made available to research groups around the world. David Hawking and I coordinated the TREC Web Track experiments. I am currently involved in the TREC Terabyte Track and Enterprise Track. Some publications: Book chapter preprint (pdf), IR'01 (citeseer) and CSIRO'01 (pdf). I also work on effective Web search, which means making use of information in pages, link structure and URL structure to generate more useful Web search results. Some papers: SIGIR'05 (pdf), SIGIR'01 (pdf), TOIS'03 (pdf) (copying is by permission of ACM, Inc.) and ADCS'03 (pdf). My PhD was in distributed information retrieval (thesis pdf) which means building a system on top of multiple engines/databases that already exist. My recent work in the area has considered whether (or when) DIR is really practical. Some papers: ADC'99 (ps), DL'00 (pdf), ADC'03 (pdf) and ADC'04 (pdf).

Publications (bibtex) (DBLP) 2007 Random walks on the click graph  (pdf) Nick Craswell and Martin Szummer Proceedings of SIGIR 2007 Searching Documents Based on Relevance and Type  (pdf) Jun Xu and Yunbo Cao and Hang Li and Nick Craswell and Yalou Huang ECIR 2007 2006 Optimisation methods for ranking functions with multiple parameters  (pdf) Michael Taylor and Hugo Zaragoza and Nick Craswell and Stephen Robertson and Chris Burges Proceedings of CIKM 2006 Quality and Relevance of Domain-specific Search: A Case Study   (pdf) Thanh Tang and Nick Craswell and David Hawking and Kathleen Griffiths and Helen Christensen Information Retrieval 2005 Relevance weighting for query independent evidence  (pdf) Nick Craswell and Stephen Robertson and Hugo Zaragoza and Michael Taylor Proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2005 Focused crawling for both topical relevance and quality of medical information  (pdf) Thanh Tang and David Hawking and Nick Craswell and Kathleen Griffiths Proceedings of CIKM 2005 Very Large Scale Retrieval and Web Search  (pdf) David Hawking and Nick Craswell Chapter in TREC: Experiment and Evaluation in Information Retrieval Microsoft Cambridge at TREC-14: Enterprise Track  (pdf) Nick Craswell and Hugo Zaragoza and Stephen Robertson Proceedings of TREC-2005 The TREC terabyte retrieval track  (pdf) Charles Clarke and Nick Craswell and Ian Soboroff SIGIR Forum 2004 Microsoft Cambridge at TREC 2004: Web and HARD track  (pdf) (This has the "multiple b's" version of BM25) Hugo Zaragoza and Nick Craswell and Michael Taylor and Suchi Saria and Stephen Robertson Proceedings of TREC-2004 Toward Better Weighting of Anchors  (pdf) David Hawking and Trystan Upstill and Nick Craswell Proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2004 (poster abstract) Testbed for Information Extraction from Deep Web  (pdf) Yasuhiro Yamada and Nick Craswell and Tetsuya Nakatoh and Sachio Hirokawa WWW2004 Poster Proceedings How Valuable is External Link Evidence when Searching Enterprise Webs?  (pdf) David Hawking and Nick Craswell and Francis Crimmins and Trystan Upstill Proceedings of the Australasian Database Conference ADC2004 Overview of the TREC-2004 Terabyte Track  (pdf) Charles Clarke and Nick Craswell and Ian Soboroff Proceedings of TREC-2004 Overview of the TREC-2004 Web Track  (pdf) Nick Craswell and David Hawking Proceedings of TREC-2004 Performance and Cost Tradeoffs in Web Search  (pdf) Nick Craswell and Francis Crimmins and David Hawking and Alistair Moffat Proceedings of the Australasian Database Conference ADC2004 2003 Engineering a multi-purpose test collection for Web retrieval experiments  (doi) Peter Bailey and Nick Craswell and David Hawking Information Processing and Management Query-independent evidence in home page finding  (pdf) (copying is by permission of ACM Inc.) Trystan Upstill and Nick Craswell and David Hawking ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) Automated Discovery of Search Interfaces on the Web  (pdf) Jared Cope and Nick Craswell and David Hawking The Fourteenth Australasian Database Conference Overview of the TREC-2003 Web Track  (pdf) Nick Craswell and David Hawking and Ross Wilkinson and Mingfang Wu Proceedings of TREC-2003 Predicting Fame and Fortune: PageRank or Indegree?  (pdf) Trystan Upstill and Nick Craswell and David Hawking Proceedings of the Australasian Document Computing Symposium ADCS2003 Summary of the SIGIR 2003 workshop on defining evaluation methodologies for terabyte-scale test collections  (pdf) Ian Soboroff and Ellen Voorhees and Nick Craswell SIGIR Forum TREC12 Web and Interactive Tracks at CSIRO  (pdf) Nick Craswell and David Hawking and Trystan Upstill and Alistair McLean and Ross Wilkinson and Mingfang Wu Proceedings of TREC-2003 2002 Overview of the TREC-2002 Web Track  (pdf) Nick Craswell and David Hawking Proceedings of TREC-2002 Buying bestsellers online: A case study in Search & Searchability  (pdf) Trystan Upstill and Nick Craswell and David Hawking 7th Australasian Document Computing Symposium CSIRO INEX experiments: XML search using PADRE  (pdf) Anne-Marie Vercoustre and James A. Thom and Alexander Krumpholz and Ian Mathieson and Peter Wilkins and Mingfang Wu and Nick Craswell and David Hawking INEX 2002 Workshop Enterprise search: What works and what doesn't  (pdf) David Hawking and Nick Craswell and Francis Crimmins and Trystan Upstill Proceedings of the Infonortics Search Engines Meeting TREC11 Web and Interactive Tracks at CSIRO  (pdf) Nick Craswell and David Hawking and James Thom and Trystan Upstill and Ross Wilkinson and Mingfang Wu Proceedings of TREC-2002 XML Document Retrieval with PADRE  (pdf) Nick Craswell and David Hawking and Alexander Krumpholz and Ian Mathieson and James A. Thom and Anne-Marie Vercoustre and Peter Wilkins and Mingfang Wu 7th Australasian Document Computing Symposium 2001 Effective site finding using link anchor information  (pdf) Nick Craswell and David Hawking and Stephen Robertson Proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2001 Overview of the TREC-2001 Web Track  (pdf) David Hawking and Nick Craswell Proceedings of TREC-2001 Measuring search engine quality  (citeseer) David Hawking and Nick Craswell and Peter Bailey and Kathleen Griffiths Journal of Information Retrieval Which search engine is best at finding online services?  (pdf) David Hawking and Nick Craswell and Kathleen Griffiths Poster Proceedings of WWW10 Visual Clustering of Image Search Results  (citeseer) Trystan Upstill and Raj Nagappan and Nick Craswell SPIE Visual Data Exploration and Analysis VIII Panoptic Expert: Searching for experts not just for documents  (pdf) Nick Craswell and David Hawking and Anne-Marie Vercoustre and Peter Wilkins Ausweb Poster Proceedings TREC10 Web and Interactive Tracks at CSIRO  (pdf) Nick Craswell and David Hawking and Ross Wilkinson and Mingfang Wu Proceedings of TREC-2001 Which search engine is best at finding airline site home pages?  (pdf) Nick Craswell and David Hawking and Kathleen Griffiths Technical report: CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences 2000 Server Selection on the World Wide Web  (pdf) Nick Craswell and Peter Bailey and David Hawking Proceedings of the ACM Digital Libraries Conference Dark matter on the Web  (pdf) Peter Bailey and Nick Craswell and David Hawking WWW-9 Poster Proceedings Methods for Distributed Information Retrieval  (pdf) Nick Craswell ANU PhD Thesis An intranet reality check for TREC ad hoc  (pdf) David Hawking Peter Bailey and Nick Craswell Technical report: CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences Chart of darkness: Mapping a large intranet  (pdf) Peter Bailey Nick Craswell and David Hawking Technical report: CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences Efficient and flexible search using text and metadata  (pdf) David Hawking and Peter Bailey and Nick Craswell Technical report: CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences 1999 Results and challenges in Web search evaluation  (pdf) David Hawking and Nick Craswell and Paul Thistlewaite and Donna Harman Proceedings of WWW8 Merging Results from Isolated Search Engines  (ps) Nick Craswell and David Hawking and Paul Thistlewaite Proceedings of the 10th Australasian Database Conference Is it fair to evaluate Web systems using TREC ad hoc methods?  (pdf) Nick Craswell and Peter Bailey and David Hawking ACM SIGIR '99 Workshop on Web Retrieval ACSys TREC-8 experiments  (pdf) David Hawking and Peter Bailey and Nick Craswell Proceedings of TREC-8 Overview of TREC-8 Web track  (ps) David Hawking and Ellen Voorhees and Nick Craswell and Peter Bailey Proceedings of TREC-8 1998 Overview of TREC-7 Very Large Collection Track  (pdf) David Hawking and Nick Craswell and Paul Thistlewaite TREC-7 NIST special publication 500-242 ACSys TREC-7 experiments  (pdf) David Hawking and Nick Craswell and Paul Thistlewaite TREC-7 NIST special publication 500-242 1997 ANU/ACSys TREC-6 experiments  (pdf) David Hawking and Paul Thistlewaite and Nick Craswell TREC-6 NIST special publication 500-242 Aglets: A good idea for spidering?  (pdf) Nick Craswell Jason Haines Brendan Humphreys Chris Johnson and Paul Thistlewaite 4th IDEA Workshop Proceedings