In this paper, we propose MetaWeaver which can selectively utilize effective ones from registered search engines depending on queries. Traditional meta-search engines use all the registered search engines without considering which search engines are appropriate, and often return many irrelevant Web pages in the hit list. In contrast with that, MetaWeaver is able to evaluate the specialties of e...

Distributed heterogeneous search environments are an emerging phenomenon in Web search. Together with new promises they bring new challenges. We describe COUGAR, a learning system that competes in such environments. A heterogeneous search environment consists of multiple specialised search engines and metasearchers. All these components can be independently owned and controlled. Specialised sea...

The Web and especially major Web search engines are essential tools in the quest to locate online information for many people. This paper reports results from research that examines characteristics and changes in Web searching from nine studies of five Web search engines based in the US and Europe. We compare interactions occurring between users and Web search engines from the perspectives of s...

The Web has very rapidly evolved over the last decade, from a mostly text-based information channel to a powerful multimedia-publishing medium rivalling traditional print media. Most internet search engines have matched this evolution of the Web from text to multimedia by developing their own dedicated image search tools and interfaces, and there are even some search engines that specialize onl...

The Deep Net refers to the thousands of topic-specific search engines on the Internet, including those that are inaccessible to traditional crawler-based search engines. Commercial metasearch engines have been slow to provide a simple, universal interface to these smaller topic-specific search engines. Turbo10 has developed a commercial metasearch engine that connects to these resources en mass...