Are Many Heads Better Than One-On Combining Information from Multiple Internet Sources

Since different Internet search engines produce different results for the same query, we can say that they “see” the world differently. The question then arises: how to combine answers from different sources in such a way that the obtained answer would be “better” than when using only a single source? What suggest combining “advice” from multiple sources is a standard situation, when a panel of experts is used to address a problem. Combining multiple suggestions can be achieved, among others, utilizing a Consensus method [5, 2, 4], Game Theory and Auctions [8, 7]. These approaches have been originally proposed as based on software agents. While this is somewhat spurious (proposed functionalities can be achieved without agents), we follow predecessors and use JADE agent platform to implement combining information from multiple Internet sources. This note is organized as follows. In the next section we introduce the three approaches to information joining. We follow with preliminary experimental results and their analysis.