Multi-domain meta search engine with an intelligent interface for efficient information retrieval on the web

Abstract

A web search engine searches for information in the World Wide Web. The user needs to search for information in various domains such as financial and healthcare. The user is expected to remember various Vertical Search Engine names to extract appropriate information. A Vertical Search Engine is a domain specific search engine that provides the user with results for specific queries on that domain. Often the user is unable to get the exact information from the web due to the different page ranking techniques followed by individual search engines. Meta Search Engines solve this problem to a certain level by sending the user's search queries to various search engines and combining the search results. This paper proposes Multi Domain Meta Search Engines that facilitate efficient Information Retrieval on multiple domains. User interfaces for selecting domain, category and search engines is presented. An intelligent User Interface is also designed to get the user query and to send it to appropriate search engines. Few algorithms are designed to combine results from various search engines and also to display the results. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.