Meta search mash

 

Combing two different types of web search tools could make finding information much easier.

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There were over 11.5 billion web pages in the publicly indexable web as of the end of January 2005, and the number of web pages available will continue to grow. The problem of collating all that information will only get worse, according to the researchers.

To help solve the problem, information technology scientists Liu Wei and Chen Junjie from the Taiyuan University of Technology, in Shanxi, China, have brought together two distinct types of computer software to help them build a new search engine that can intelligently ‘crawl’ other search engines.

They describe their new search robot in Inderscience's International Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering.

"Traditional search engines cannot cope easily with this rapid expansion of information resources,” explained Junjie.

The team turned to the concept of search agents to solve the problem.

Virtual robots

Search agents, are intelligent ‘virtual robots’ that can scan data very quickly looking for keywords and assessing the context of their findings.

For instance, returning results related only to apples rather than Apple computers, when a fruit farmer searches for information on tasty new strains. There are several tools available to computer programmers for creating such agents.

The researchers have then combined the search agent idea with another technology, the so-called meta search engine.

Meta searches involve scanning information, like Google or the Yahoo index, from all available sources.

Sites such as Bytesearch, MetaCrawler and Ixquick are well-known meta search tools.

The team developed a new intelligent search agent and combined it with a meta search tool.

The new agent can determine the context of the user's search terms and choose appropriate search engines to scan - tt then retrieves the most relevant results.

Team member Liu Wei provided an example of how the system might work in practice: “Suppose you are interested in a specific football team. Our meta-search engine would find your user profile containing your interest in football, when you enter a keyword such as ‘football’, the information on your favourite team from the various search engines will be retrieved preferentially."

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