Usearch: A Meta Search Engine based on a new result merging strategy

Abstract

Meta Search Engines are finding tools developed for improving the search performance by submitting user queries to multiple search engines and combining the different search results in a unified ranked list. The effectiveness of a Meta search engine is closely related to the result merging strategy it employs. But nowadays, the main issue in the conception of such systems is the merging strategy of the returned results. With only the user query as relevant information about his information needs, it's hard to use it to find the best ranking of the merged results. We present in this paper a new strategy of merging multiple search engine results using only the user query as a relevance criterion. We propose a new score function combining the similarity between user query and retrieved results and the users' satisfaction toward used search engines. The proposed Meta search engine can be used for merging search results of any set of search engines.