Role of Meta Search Engines in Web- based Information System: Fundamentals and Challenges

Abstract

Meta search engines are powerful tools that search multiple search engines simultaneously. Unlike crawler-based search engines such as Google, AllTheWeb, AltaVista and others, meta search engines generally do not build and maintain their own web indexes. Instead, they use the indexes built by others, aggregating and often postprocessing results in unique ways. Meta search engines accept your query, and send it out to multiple search engines in parallel. They are often quite fast, using private “backdoor” servers made available by the search engines they query. They get this privileged status thanks to revenue sharing agreements. There are several advantages to using meta search engines, though they’re not always the most appropriate tool. The most obvious advantage is that you can get results from multiple search engines without having to visit each in turn. Apart from the time savings, there is some evidence that this gives your search a broader scope, since each individual search engine’s index differs from all others. Present paper attempts to highlights the role of meta search engine in web- based information retrieval