Experiences with selecting search engines using metasearch

Abstract

Search engines are among the most useful and high-profile resources on the Internet. The problem of finding information on the Internet has been replaced with the problem of knowing where search engines are, what they are designed to retrieve, and how to use them. This article describes and evaluates SavvySearch, a metasearch engine designed to intelligently select and interface with multiple remote search engines. The primary metasearch issue examined is the importance of carefully selecting and ranking remote search engines for user queries. We studied the efficacy of SavvySearch's incrementally acquired metaindex approach to selecting search engines by analyzing the effect of time and experience on performance. We also compared the metaindex approach to the simpler categorical approach and showed how much experience is required to surpass the simple scheme.