Rank aggregation for meta-search engines

Abstract

In this paper, we present an algorithm for merging results from different data sources in meta-search engine. We further extend one that has developed for ranking players of a round-robin tournament to a more general one when the ranking input is given from multiple sources. The problem in meta-search engine can be represented by a complete directed graph which can be used by the Majority Spanning Tree (MST) algorithm. It is useful especially when the system must integrate and merge the query results that are returned from various search engines in a consistent manner.