Architecture of a metasearch engine that supports user information needs

  • Authors:

  • Eric J. Glover;Steve Lawrence;William P. Birmingham;C. Lee Giles

  • Affiliations:

  • NEC Research Institute, 4 Independence Way, Princeton, NJ and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Michigan, 1101 Beal Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI;NEC Research Institute, 4 Independence Way, Princeton, NJ;Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Michigan, 1101 Beal Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI;NEC Research Institute, 4 Independence Way, Princeton, NJ

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the eighth international conference on Information and knowledge management
  • Year:
  • 1999

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

When a query is submitted to a metasearch engine, decisions are made with respect to the underlying search engines to be used, what modifications will be made to the query, and how to score the results. These decisions are typically made by considering only the user's keyword query, neglecting the larger information need. Users with specific needs, such as “research papers” or “homepages,” are not able to express these needs in a way that affects the decisions made by the metasearch engine. In this paper, we describe a metasearch engine architecture that considers the user's information need for each decision. Users with different needs, but the same keyword query, may search different sub-search engines, have different modifications made to their query, and have results ordered differently. Our architecture combines several powerful approaches together in a single general purpose metasearch engine.