Connecting Diverse Web Search Facilities.

Abstract

The World Wide Web is now providing hundreds of powerful search facilities, often for free, enabling people to access an enormous amount of information. The most successful search facilities to date are the global flat databases that attempt to put everything in one place. We believe that this approach will not scale. This paper describes techniques and software that we developed to connect together many different diverse search facilities, allowing people to focus and customize their search much better and increase the precision of the results. 1 Introduction With the explosion of available information, search is becoming one of the most important computer activities. Getting the right information at the right time with minimal effort is the main competitive edge in many businesses. The most commonly-used search facilities on the web are the global search engines such as Altavista, Infoseek, Excite, HotBot, and Lycos. They collect as much of the web as they can into one large databa...