The potential of the metasearch engine

Research into metasearch engines has traditionally been focused on source engine selection and the re-ranking and integration of multiple search engines' results. In this paper we describe existing and new techniques that metasearch engines can apply to broaden the services provided to the searcher, by capturing and analyzing information already flowing through the meteasearch engine—the queries, their results, and the clicks made by users. In addition, we demonstrate the potential for the engine to generate related queries, related pages, and to recommend queries for web site builders to target through optimization or advertising.