METASEARCH

National institute of science &Technology

META SEARCH

Presented By
Chilika Pujari

Under the guidance of

Mr. Indraneel Mukhopadhyay

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What is it?
National institute of science &Technology

 A meta search engine is a system that supports

unified access to multiple local search engines
 It does not maintain its own index on web pages .
 A metasearch engine is an effective tool to quickly
reach a large portion of the deep Web

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When to use?
National institute of science &Technology

 Need to be used cautiously

 Good for simple searches, particularly if search
terms are distinctive or unique
 Good for testing with a few keywords – and find
which individual search engine returns good results
 Good for ‘quick and dirty searching’ if you are in a
hurry and want to find a few relevant sites quickly
 For complex searches, involving many search
terms, Boolean logic, etc., it is better to use
individual search engines

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METASEARCH ENGINE
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TECHNOLOGY
It includes

 techniques that identify what search engines are

likely to contain useful results for a given query .

 methods that determine what pages from selected

search engines should be retrieved and how the
results from different search engines should be
merged are reviewed.

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Metasearch Software Component Architecture
National institute of science &Technology

User
1 8
User Interface
2
Database Selector 7 Result Extractors
3 Collection Fusion
Document Selector Result Merger
4
Query Dispatcher 6 6
5
5
Search Search
Engine ...... Engine

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Metasearch Software Component......

National institute of science &Technology

Database selector
It is responsible for sending each user query to only
potentially useful search engines for processing
failing on which it may cause wasteful network traffic
The database selection process can be classified into
the three categories
Rough representative approaches
Statistical representative approaches
Learning-based approaches

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Metasearch Software Component......

National institute of science &Technology

Rough representative approaches: The representative of a

database contains only a few selected key words or paragraphs .
It can only provide a very general description about the
contents of databases .
Statistical representative approaches: Database
representatives have detailed statistical information about the
document databases. This detailed statistics allow more
accurate estimation of database usefulness with respect to any
user query .
Learning-based approaches: It learns the knowledge
regarding which databases are likely to return useful pages to
what types of queries from past retrieval experiences.

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Metasearch Software Component......

National institute of science &Technology

Collection fusion
This method determines what Web pages should be
retrieved from each selected search engine and how
the retrieved Web pages from multiple search
engines should be merged into a single result list.
It includes two modules:
 document selection module (document selector)
 result merge module (result merger)

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Metasearch Software Component......

National institute of science &Technology

Document selector: It determines what pages to

retrieve from the document database of the search
engine .It retrieves as many potentially useful pages as
possible, and as few useless pages as possible .
Result merger: It combines the results into a single
ranked list .It ranks all returned pages in descending
order of their desirability.

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Metasearch Software Component......

National institute of science &Technology

Result extractor: URLs of retrieved pages are

correctly extracted from the HTML file of each result
page. Since different search engines use different
ways to organize their result, a separate result
extractor needs to be created for each local search
engine.
Query dispatcher: It established a connection with
the server of the search engine and passes the query
to it. HTTP is used for the connection and data
transfer.
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Advantages & Disadvantages

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Advantages
 Query can be run across multiple search engines
 User needs to learn only the search interface of the
meta search tool
 Better results: retrieves top-ranking pages from
individual search engines
Disadvantages
 Unique features of individual search engines is lost
 Not exhaustive: use only top results returned by
search engines

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EXAMPLES OF
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META SEARCH ENGINES

All-in-One Search Page (http://www.allonesearch.com/)
Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com/)
Find.com (http://www.find.com/)
MetaCrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com/ )
SavvySearch (http://www.savvysearch.com/)
WebRing (http://www.webring.org/)

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CONCLUSION
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• Meta search provide a common interface and

conduct searches in many search engines
simultaneously and return results in a uniform format
• It do not gather web pages, build indexes, accept
URL additions, classify or review web sites

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 National institute of science &Technology

CHILIKA PUJARI
METASEARCH

THANK YOU !!

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