Efficient and Effective Metasearch engines

 

Abstract

It is now a common practice for ordinary people to utilize search engines to retrieve information from the Web. Although quite a few existing engines are very powerful, none of them is capable of covering most materials from the Web. Thus, it may be desirable to have a metasearch engine which invokes multiple underlying search engines for a given query so that a higher coverage of the Web is achieved. In order that the metasearch engine is efficient, a small number of search engines should be invoked for a given query and only promising documents are retrieved from each invoked search engine. An effective metasearch engine needs to take into consideration not only similarities of documents but also usefulness of documents which may be exhibited by linkages among documents. In this talk, we present techniques to construct an efficient and effective metasearch engine. We also sketch research issues including the use of metasearch engines for comparative shopping.