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<article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Document Quality Scoring for Web Crawling</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Francesca Pezzuti</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Ariane Mueller</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Sean MacAvaney</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Nicola Tonellotto</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>University of Glasgow</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Glasgow</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="UK">United Kingdom</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>University of Pisa</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Pisa</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="IT">Italy</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <pub-date>
        <year>2025</year>
      </pub-date>
      <abstract>
        <p>The internet contains large amounts of low-quality content, yet users expect web search engines to deliver high-quality, relevant results. The abundant presence of low-quality pages can negatively impact retrieval and crawling processes by wasting resources on these documents. Therefore, search engines can greatly benefit from techniques that leverage eficient quality estimation methods to mitigate these negative impacts. Quality scoring methods for web pages are useful for many processes typical for web search systems, including static index pruning, index tiering, and crawling. Building on work by Chang et al. [1], who proposed using neural estimators of semantic quality for static index pruning, we extend their approach and apply their neural quality scorers to assess the semantic quality of web pages in crawling prioritisation tasks. In our experimental analysis, we found that prioritising semantically high-quality pages over low-quality ones can improve downstream search efectiveness. Our software contribution consists of a Docker container that computes an efective quality score for a given web page, allowing the quality scorer to be easily included and used in other components of web search systems.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>eol&gt;Quality scoring</kwd>
        <kwd>Web crawling</kwd>
        <kwd>Information Retrieval</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>1. Introduction</title>
      <p>
        The Internet contains vast amounts of information, yet not all of it is of high quality. In fact, the web is
iflled with low-quality web pages, including meaningless pages, keyword-stufed pages, and spam [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ].
If not properly managed, this abundance of low-quality pages, can pose significant challenges for web
search engines, whose primary goal is to deliver high-quality, relevant results to users. Firstly,
lowquality pages may introduce unnecessary overheads: they need to be crawled, indexed, and processed
at query time, consuming resources that could be better spent on high-quality web pages and ultimately
slowing down search systems. Secondly, despite being semantically poor, low-quality pages may still
rank highly in search results (especially from systems that do not consider semantic quality, such as
lexical retrievers), negatively afecting retrieval efectiveness. To improve eficiency and efectiveness
of web search systems, a heuristic for estimating page quality is thus highly valuable. With such a
heuristic, search engines can mitigate the negative impacts of low-quality pages. For instance, one
technique that can be employed to speed up indexing and ranking times while decreasing memory
requirements, is static index pruning. This approach discards low-quality pages from the search index.
As an example of this, Chang et al. recently proposed a neural quality estimator that approximates
semantic quality and has proven strongly efective for static indexing pruning [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]. Meanwhile, to speed
up the retrieval of high-quality results at query processing time, search engines can implement tiered
indexing [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ]. This approach consists in organising the index in multiple tiers based on page quality:
high-quality pages are placed in the top tier to be retrieved quickly, low quality-ones are placed in
lower tiers and are processed only when necessary. Finally, quality estimation is crucial in the crawling
stage of a web search engine, where the goal is to traverse the web link graph and download pages
to build a corpus of documents. Specifically, the crawler component of a search systems often uses
quality estimation heuristics to prioritise the download of high-quality web pages over low-quality ones,
aiming to improve the early downstream ranking efectiveness of the retriever component. Common
quality estimation methods for crawling prioritisation include those based on connectivity metrics
like PageRank [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ] and indegree [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ], or Click-Through-Rate [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ]. However, these quality estimation
techniques often have high computational demands [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ], require storing information about the web
graph, or the previous popularity of web pages [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ]. More importantly, to the best of our knowledge,
existing prioritisation techniques for crawlers do not account for the semantic quality of web pages.
      </p>
      <p>
        Considering the semantic quality of pages during crawling has substantial potential. Chang et al.
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ] showed that these signals can be useful for static pruning, and Yu et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ] showed that they can
be useful for identifying language model pre-training data. Therefore, in this work, we test whether
semantic quality signals are helpful for prioritising web pages to crawl for a search engine. The central
hypothesis is that documents of similar semantic quality will likely link to one another: high-quality
to high-quality and low-quality to low-quality.1 By leveraging this signal, we anticipate that we can
both identify high-quality pages faster during crawling and avoid wasting resources on low-quality
pages. To assess this goal, we implement a dockerised quality scoring module. As this approach
is containerised, it can be easily included and used in Open Web Search (OWS) components [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ] to
compute document quality scores. Additionally, we integrate this quality scoring approach within the
Resilipipe pre-processing pipeline [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ]. Using our implementation, we score subsets of the main and
legal collections of OWS datasets [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ]. However, since these two collections are not associated with a
web graph, we conduct a proof of concept on crawling prioritisation strategies based on neural quality
estimators using the English subset of the ClueWeb22-B [12] web corpus. Our analysis reveals that the
distribution of quality scores of the two OWS datasets closely matches that of the English subset of
ClueWeb22-B, suggesting that our findings for this dataset are likely to generalise to OWS.
      </p>
      <p>Specifically, our preliminary findings on ClueWeb22-B [ 12] show that by prioritising web pages
with high semantic quality over those with lower quality, relevant content is implicitly prioritised over
irrelevant content. Our experiments show that an oracle crawler leveraging a semantic quality scorer
improves early downstream recall efectiveness compared to two well-known graph-traversal crawling
strategies, namely Breadth-First-Search [13] and Depth-First-Search crawlers [14]. Furthermore, because
the quality of a page is positively correlated with that of its (outlinking) neighbours, its quality score can
serve as an estimate for the quality of pages it links to. Consequently, in real-world crawling scenarios
where the text of a web page is unavailable before its download, these estimates can efectively be used
to prioritise semantically valuable web pages, to skip pages mostly linked to by low-quality pages, or to
avoid crawling domains that mostly host low-quality pages.</p>
      <p>The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. First, in Section 2 we describe the quality
scorer and web crawler used for the mentioned proof of concept experiments. In Section 3 we provide
details on our implementation of quality scoring for OWS datasets. Then, in Section 4 we describe our
experimental setup. In Section 5 we show and discuss results of our experiments. Lastly, in Section 6
we summarise our contribution and give an outlook on potential future work.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>2. Methodology</title>
      <p>
        A quality scorer component for a web search system consists of a large language model (LLM) (denoted
as  ), trained to distinguish pages of high semantic quality from low-quality ones [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]. Formally, a
quality scorer parametrised by  is characterised by a quality scoring function  :  ↦→ R that estimates
the semantic quality of a text  with a real valued score  =  (). This value is referred to as a quality
score. Because quality scorers are based on LLM models, they can eficiently generate quality scores in
batches, making them suitable for simultaneously scoring multiple text documents.
      </p>
      <p>
        These quality scorers can be applied in a variety of contexts, both to improve eficiency and
efectiveness. For example, they have already proven efective for static pruning tasks [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]. Another promising
application is the prioritisation of web pages characterised by high semantic quality during the crawling
process, to build semantically high-quality corpora and improving downstream efectiveness.
      </p>
      <p>
        The crawler component of a web search system systematically traverses the web graph following
hyperlinks and downloading web pages valuable for downstream tasks like retrieval. To achieve this, it
1This intuition matches the intuition of PageRank [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ], but considers the semantic quality of the document contents, rather
than the link structure.
maintains a priority queue of links yet to be crawled, ordered by quality. We propose using the quality
scorer described in the previous section to assign a quality score to each page, which is then used to
determine its crawling priority in the queue. However, in real-world crawling scenarios the text of a
page is unavailable before its crawl. Therefore, such an approach is only applicable if it is combined
with an oracle function  :  ↦→  that provides the text  of a web page  before the page is actually
downloaded. We call this approach QOracle. Given a quality scorer  and an oracle function (· ),
the QOracle crawler computes the crawling priority  of a web page  as:
      </p>
      <p>=  (()) =  () = ,
where the priority  is a real-valued score reflecting the level of semantic quality  of the textual
content  of page  to be crawled.</p>
      <p>However, in most real-world scenarios we do not have access to an oracle function. Consequently,
crawlers need to rely on alternative methods based on quality approximations. Indeed, if the quality of
a page reflects the quality of its neighbours in the web graph, one could approximate the quality of
an un-crawled linked page using the quality of the in-linking page during crawling prioritisation. To
test this hypothesis, we measure the linear correlation between the quality of a page  and the mean
quality of the pages it links to. Formally, we denote with  :  ↦→ {1, . . . ,  } the function that given
a page , returns the set of pages  () = {1 . . . ,  } with an incoming link from . We also denote
with ^ ∈ R the mean quality of pages in  (), and we compute it as:
^ =
1</p>
      <p>∑︁ ,
| ()| ∈ ()
where  is the quality score of a neighbour page of , computed with  . To investigate how the
quality of a page relates to the quality of the pages it links to, we propose to measure how strongly the
quality of a page  correlates to the quality ^ of its out-linking pages on a collection of web pages.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>3. Software Implementation</title>
      <p>In this section we provide details on the architecture and implementation of our containerised quality
scoring module as well as the integration of quality scoring within the Resilipipe preprocessing pipeline.</p>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>3.1. Quality Scoring Module</title>
        <p>
          In order to make our approach easily deployable in a crawling or pre-processing scenario, we sandbox
our application within a custom Docker container as shown in Figure 1. While the standard input
and output file format of the container is parquet (in accordance with the file format used for the
pre-processed OWS datasets, i.e. datasets in owi-format [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
          ], which are described in further detail in
Section 4), it also ofers support for several other formats, including csv and json. This allows the
quality scorer to be easily integrated and used in other components of the web index of OWS.
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-2">
        <title>3.2. Integration with Resilipipe</title>
        <p>
          In addition to the dockerised quality scoring module, we integrate quality scoring as an additional
module of the Resilipipe preprocessing pipeline [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
          ]. This pipeline receives the crawled warc files,
containing the full HTTP request/response stream from the crawling process, as input and extracts
information such as outlinks, plain text, geoinformation and the language of the respective website(s).
As a last step, the websites/ documents are indexed and the extracted metadata is provided in parquet
ifles. Adding quality scoring of documents to the pipeline allows to use the obtained scores during
indexing (or other post-processing steps) e.g. for filtering out low-quality documents that should not be
indexed, therefore reducing index size and retrieval latency [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
          ].
        </p>
        <p>Dataset
(ciff+parquet/
json/csv)</p>
        <p>Process parquet files
separately</p>
        <p>Container
QualT5-small</p>
        <p>Quality: -0.034</p>
        <p>Scored
documents
(parquet/
json/csv)</p>
        <p>For our module, we employ the same QT5-small based scorer as used for the containerised version.
The model receives the plaintext of a document, which was extracted in a previous step, and produces
the corresponding quality score. The score is added as an additional column in the extracted metadata
and is accessible to post-processing modules in the pipeline. The full architecture of the pipeline is
visualised in Figure 2. The pre-processing step parses the HTML, extracting the HTML tree and the
plaintext of a document, as well as metadata such as language. The standard modules are additional
pre-implemented modules that extract further metadata such as link or geo-information [15]. After the
standard and quality scoring modules, the resulting data is stored in parquet files and the documents
are indexed.</p>
        <p>PreProcessing</p>
        <p>Standard
Modules</p>
        <p>Quality Scoring</p>
        <p>Module</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>4. Experimental Setup</title>
      <p>In this section we describe the setup used in our experimental analysis, and provide details on the used
datasets and training procedures for the neural quality scorer.</p>
      <p>
        Quality scoring for Open Web Search datasets We deploy the containerised quality scoring
module described in Section 3.1 to estimate the document quality of several OWS datasets. As our
quality estimator, we use the QT5-small based model trained by Chang et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ] without further
ifne-tuning. It is important to note that this and all other quality scoring models used in our experiments
assign the log-probability for a document of being relevant to at least one user query as its quality
score. In particular, we score English documents from (arbitrarily) selected subsets of the legal and main
collections of OWS [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ]. All used datasets are in owi-format, i.e. they consist of several parquet files
containing document (meta-)data as well as a ciff index file. Table 1 shows an overview of all scored
datasets. It is to be noted that the OWS main and legal collections as well as our subsets of them are not
mutually exclusive, i.e. their documents may overlap. However, as mentioned in the introduction, the
OWS datasets do not provide a corresponding web graph nor a set of queries associated with relevance
judgements. Hence, we use the ClueWeb22-B dataset for further experimentation as follows.
Quality scoring for ClueWeb22-B To estimate the quality for pages in the subset of 87 million
English head web pages of ClueWeb22-B [12] (ClueWeb22-B (en)), and being coherent with the scoring
      </p>
      <p>
        Original size
main
main
main
main
main
main
main
main
legal
legal
legal
legal
it4i
lrz
lrz
lrz
lrz
lrz
lrz
lrz
it4i
it4i
it4i
it4i
Crawling ClueWeb22-B To perform the experiments on ClueWeb22-B (en), we fine-tune our
QT5small model using a version of the training procedure provided in the original paper [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ], modified
to work with the ClueWeb22 dataset. In particular, we sample 9.1 million documents with positive
relevance label from the MS MARCO Web Search dataset [16], and we use them as positive quality
labels, considering the remaining set of documents as negatives. The model converged after 1.6 million
training instances. Our QT5-small quality scorer model fine-tuned on MS MARCO Web Search, is
available on HuggingFace2. In our simulations of crawling processes, we always start from a fixed set
of 100 thousand randomly selected seed pages, and we reach a total of 29 million pages. To evaluate
the early downstream efectiveness of our oracle crawler, we index the crawled corpora after every 5
million pages have been crawled. We compare our proposed oracle crawler using Breadth-First-Search
(BFS) [13] and Depth-First-Search (DFS) [14] crawlers as baselines.
      </p>
      <sec id="sec-4-1">
        <title>Query sets &amp; Downstream Retrieval efectiveness To evaluate crawlers in terms of downstream</title>
        <p>retrieval efectiveness, we measure the recall at cutof 100, of a BM25 retriever [17]. We use a mix of
queries from the Researchy Questions query set (RQ) [18] and MS MARCO Web Search query set
(MSMWS) [16]. Both these two datasets are generated from the logs of commercial search engines. While
MSM-WS contains explicit relevance assessments extracted from a real click-log, RQ only provides a
click distribution; thus, for queries from RQ, we consider as relevant the most clicked page. In particular,
we measure the retrieval recall at cutof 100 (R@100), for a query set composed of 850 queries randomly
selected from RQ, and 850 queries randomly selected from MSM-WS. For significance testing we conduct
Bonferroni-corrected pairwise t-tests with  ≤ 0.01.</p>
        <p>Code, Container, and Data Availability We publish on Github the code for our dockerised quality
scoring component3 as well as our custom Resilipipe module4. We also provide the code for reproducing
experiments and crawling simulations on ClueWeb22-B (en)5. The quality scores computed on OWS
datasets are available on Zenodo6 [19], whereas those computed on ClueWeb22-B (en) are available on
HuggingFace7.
2https://huggingface.co/macavaney/qt5-small-msw
3https://github.com/ArianeS21/quality_scoring
4https://github.com/ArianeS21/resilipipe_quality_scoring
5https://github.com/fpezzuti/quality_crawling
6https://zenodo.org/records/15110099
7macavaney/cw22b-en.qt5-small-msw.cache
2M
1M
0M
30M
25M
20M
15M
10M
5M
6</p>
        <p>4
Quality
2
0
0M 8
6</p>
        <p>4
Quality
2
0
0M 8
6</p>
        <p>4
Quality
2
0</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>5. Experimental Analysis</title>
      <p>In this section we describe and discuss our experiments and their results.</p>
      <sec id="sec-5-1">
        <title>5.1. Comparison between quality score distributions</title>
        <p>
          To gain an insight into the similarity between the OWS collections and ClueWeb22-B w.r.t. document
quality, we measure and compare quality scores computed on the three datasets described in Section
4, i.e., OWS (main), OWS (legal), and ClueWeb22-B (en). Figure 3 shows the distributions of quality
scores for the respective datasets. Based on the shown histograms, we note that the three considered
datasets exhibit very similar quality distributions, especially the two OWS collections. This result is
also quantitatively confirmed by the values of the Jensen-Shannon distance values computed for pairs
of histogram distributions, as shown in Table 2. The OWS legal collection is a subset of the (full) OWS
main collection [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
          ], thus our samples of these two collections may overlap in parts, which could partially
account for their extremely similar quality distributions. Surprisingly, the Jensen-Shannon distance
between the distributions of quality scores computed on OWS legal collection and ClueWeb22-B (en) is
lower than the one between the two distributions computed on OWS collections. Notably, all three
datasets also have very high quality overall. This is not surprising since ClueWeb22-B consists of
the most frequently visited pages, which are thus highly relevant to users and of good quality [12].
Similarly, the OWS datasets are pre-filtered for malicious URLs and spam documents using an exclusion
list [20] and thus should not include any extremely low-quality pages. As already mentioned, since
the two OWS datasets we consider neither provide a web graph, nor a query set for retrieval tasks
associated with relevance labels, we conduct all subsequent experiments on ClueWeb22-B (en). However,
since the quality distributions of OWS datasets and ClueWeb22-B (en) are very similar, our findings on
ClueWeb22-B likely also hold true for OWS data.
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-5-2">
        <title>5.2. Relationship between quality &amp; relevance</title>
        <p>On ClueWeb22-B (en), we first investigate whether quality scores provide good relevance signals, aiming
to understand if by prioritising web pages with high semantic quality during the crawl, relevant pages
are automatically prioritised. To this end, we consider as relevant, all the web pages of ClueWeb22-B
200
.
q
rFe150
100
50
0
Relevants Irrelevants
20</p>
        <p>Quality
40
30
10
0
0.05
0
5
10 15 20
Number of crawled pages (M)</p>
        <p>BFS
DFS</p>
        <p>QOracle
25
30
(en) that have been judged relevant for at least one query belonging to the union of the entire RQ and
MSM-WS query sets. The remaining documents are considered irrelevant. In Figure 4 we show how the
quality distributions of relevant and irrelevant documents difer. In particular, from Figure 4, we note
that relevant web pages generally exhibit higher quality than irrelevant ones, suggesting that quality
scoring using neural estimators is a useful heuristic for distinguishing relevant pages from irrelevant
ones. Hence, the quality score is a promising relevance signal. However, the large overlap between
the two distributions indicates that the quality score alone does not allow for a perfect distinction.
Thus, future work could focus on combining the relevance signal coming from neural quality scorers
with other types of relevance signals to enhance efectiveness. Since quality scores are good relevance
signals, we expect that employing quality scorers to prioritise high-quality pages during the crawling
process could increase the likelihood of discovering relevant web pages early on.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-5-3">
        <title>5.3. Downstream retrieval efectiveness of a QOracle</title>
        <p>As a proof of concept, we next explore if prioritising semantically high-quality pages during the crawling
process – leveraging neural quality scorers – can improve the downstream retrieval efectiveness of
a search system. To investigate this, in Figure 5 we show at diferent points in time, the retrieval
efectiveness of a BM25 retriever measured with R@100 on search corpora built by our proposed oracle
crawler (QOracle). A Breadth-First-Search (BFS) crawler and a Depth-First-Search (DFS) crawler are
shown as baselines. Our results demonstrate that the proposed QOracle crawler outperforms both
baselines in terms of early retrieval efectiveness. Therefore, guiding the crawl with a prioritisation
strategy based on semantic quality scoring has a positive impact on downstream search efectiveness.</p>
        <sec id="sec-5-3-1">
          <title>Page quality</title>
        </sec>
        <sec id="sec-5-3-2">
          <title>Mean outlink quality</title>
          <p>40
30
104
20
Page quality
Page density
105
10</p>
        </sec>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-5-4">
        <title>5.4. Quality of outlinks</title>
        <p>Finally, to gain an insight into the applicability of quality scoring in web crawling without an oracle
function, we investigate if web pages mostly link to pages with similar semantic quality. To address
this, we filter ClueWeb22-B (en) for pages containing at least one outgoing link to another page in
the same dataset. For pages in this subset, we compute the the semantic quality of the page as well
as the quality of the pages it links to. Next, we plot them in the hexagonal binning plot enriched by
two marginal histograms, shown in Figure 6. This plot shows how the quality of a web page correlates
with the average quality of the pages it links to. We note that there is a weak positive linear correlation
between these two variables, also confirmed by the Pearson correlation coeficient between the two,
which is 0.286.</p>
        <p>Additionally, we observe that most web pages have medium semantic quality and link to pages
of similar quality. Meanwhile, web pages of very high semantic quality rarely link to web pages of
extremely low quality. Therefore, when a crawler follows the outgoing links of high-quality pages, it is
unlikely for it to discover very low-quality web pages. At the same time, very low-quality web pages
generally do not link to high-quality pages. As a result, low-quality pages can be de-prioritised without
the risk of missing a significant number of high-quality pages. These findings suggest that there may
be a clear separation between very high-quality and very low-quality pages. Consequently, crawlers
can use this quality estimation to prioritise the crawling of high-quality pages, aiming to discover other
valuable content while reducing the risk of wasting time and resources on low-quality pages.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>6. Conclusion &amp; Future Work</title>
      <p>In this paper, as part of our software contribution, we developed a Docker container that applies a neural
quality scorer. This quality scoring module can be easily used and integrated in various components
of web search systems to estimate the semantic quality of documents. Additionally, we introduced
an efective crawling approach that, by leveraging neural quality scorers, prioritises pages of high
semantic quality. Our early experimental analysis performed on ClueWeb22-B (en), suggests that the
prioritisation of semantically high-quality web pages during the crawl could efectively mitigate the
negative impact of low-quality content on downstream retrieval efectiveness. Furthermore, we show
that these findings are likely to generalise to Open Web Search datasets. However, our findings also
suggest that relevance signals coming from quality scoring should be combined with other signals
for improved performance. This is a promising topic for future work, along with the exploration of
crawling prioritisation strategies based on approximated quality scores.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>Acknowledgments</title>
      <p>This work was partially supported by the Spoke “FutureHPC &amp; BigData” of the ICSC – Centro Nazionale
di Ricerca in High-Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing funded by the
Italian Government, the FoReLab and CrossLab projects (Departments of Excellence), the NEREO PRIN
project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research and European Union - Next
Generation EU (M4C1 CUP 2022AEF-HAZ), and the FUN project (SGA 2024FSTPC2PN30) funded by the
OpenWebSearch.eu project (GA 101070014).</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-8">
      <title>Declaration on Generative AI</title>
      <p>The authors have not employed any Generative AI tools.
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