Skip to main content
Springer Nature Link
Log in

Metasearch Engines

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Federated search engine

Definition

Metasearch is to utilize multiple other search systems (called component search systems) to perform simultaneous search. A metasearch engine is a search system that enables metasearch. To perform a basic metasearch, a user query is sent to multiple existing search engines by the metasearch engine; when the search results returned from the search engines are received by the metasearch engine, they are merged into a single ranked list and the merged list is presented to the user. Key issues include how to pass user queries to other search engines, how to identify correct search results from the result pages returned from search engines, and how to merge the results from different search sources. More sophisticated metasearch engines also perform search engine selection (also referred to as database selection), i.e., identify the search engines that are most appropriate for a query and send the query to only these search engines. To identify...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Recommended Reading

  1. Aslam J. and Montague M. Models for metasearch. In Proc. 24th Annual Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2001, pp. 276–284.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Callan J., Connell M., and Du A. Automatic discovery of language models for text databases. In Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, 1999, pp. 479–490.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Callan J., Lu Z., and Croft W.B. Searching distributed collections with inference networks. In Proc. 18th Annual Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 1995, pp. 21–28.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Dreilinger D. and Howe A. Experiences with selecting search engines using metasearch. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst., 15(3):195–222, 1997.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Fan Y. and Gauch S. Adaptive agents for information gathering from multiple, distributed information sources. In Proc. AAAI Symp. on Intelligent Agents in Cyberspace, 1999, pp. 40–46.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Laender A.A., Ribeiro-Neto B., da Silva A., and Teixeira J. A brief survey of web data extraction tools. ACM SIGMOD Rec., 31(2):84–93, 2002.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Lawrence S. and Lee Giles C. Inquirus, the NECi meta search engine. In Proc. 7th Int. World Wide Web Conference, 1998, pp. 95–105.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Lee J-H. Combining multiple evidence from different properties of weighting schemes. In Proc. 18th Annual Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 1995, pp. 180–188.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Lu Y., Meng W., Shu L., Yu C., and Liu K. Evaluation of result merging strategies for metasearch engines. In Proc. 6th Int. Conf. on Web Information Systems Eng., 2005, pp. 53–66.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Meng W., Wu Z., Yu C., and Li Z. A highly scalable and effective method for metasearch. ACM Trans. Information Syst., 19(3):310–335, 2001.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Meng W., Yu C., and Liu K. Building efficient and effective metasearch engines. ACM Comput. Surv., 34(1):48–89, 2002.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Selberg E. and Etzioni O. The MetaCrawler architecture for resource aggregation on the web. IEEE Expert, 12(1):11–14, 1997.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Yu C., Liu K., Meng W., Wu Z., and Rishe N. A methodology to retrieve text documents from multiple databases. IEEE Trans. Knowledge and Data Eng., 14(6):1347–1361, 2002.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Yuwono B. and Lee D. Server ranking for distributed text resource systems on the internet. In Proc. 5th Int. Conf. on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, 1997, pp. 391–400.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Zhao H., Meng W., Wu Z., Raghavan V., and Yu C. Fully automatic wrapper generation for search engines. In Proc. 14th Int. World Wide Web Conf., 2005, pp. 66–75.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, NY, USA

    Weiyi Meng

Authors
  1. Weiyi Meng
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

About this entry

Cite this entry

Meng, W. (2009). Metasearch Engines. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_217

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics