  Recent advances of preservation technologies have led to an increasing number
of Web archive systems and collections. These collections are valuable to
explore the past of the Web, but their value can only be uncovered with
effective access and exploration mechanisms. Ideal search and rank- ing methods
must be robust to the high redundancy and the temporal noise of contents, as
well as scalable to the huge amount of data archived. Despite several attempts
in Web archive search, facilitating access to Web archive still remains a
challenging problem.
  In this work, we conduct a first analysis on different ranking strategies
that exploit evidences from metadata instead of the full content of documents.
We perform a first study to compare the usefulness of non-content evidences to
Web archive search, where the evidences are mined from the metadata of file
headers, links and URL strings only. Based on these findings, we propose a
simple yet surprisingly effective learning model that combines multiple
evidences to distinguish "good" from "bad" search results. We conduct empirical
experiments quantitatively as well as qualitatively to confirm the validity of
our proposed method, as a first step towards better ranking in Web archives
taking meta- data into account.
