Web Search Technology

Abstract The World Wide Web has become the largest information source in recent years and search engines are indispensable tools for finding needed information from the Web. The coverage of the Web by a single search engine may be limited. One effective way to increase the search coverage of the Web is to combine the coverage of multiple search engines. Systems that do such combination are called metasearch engines. When a metasearch engine receives a query from a user, it invokes the underlying search engines to retrieve useful information for the user and combines the returned results from multiple search engines into a single ranked list before displaying it to the user. In this chapter, we describe the inner workings of search engines and metasearch engines. Specifically, we describe techniques used to build search engines and metasearch engines.