Federated Search in the Wild: The Combined Power of over a Hundred Search Engines

Dong Nguyen, Thomas Demeester, Dolf Trieschnigg, Djoerd Hiemstra

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Federated search has the potential of improving web search: the user becomes less dependent on a single search provider and parts of the deep web become available through a unified interface, leading to a wider variety in the retrieved search results. However, a publicly available dataset for federated search reflecting an actual web environment has been absent. As a result, it has been difficult to assess whether proposed systems are suitable for the web setting. We introduce a new test collection containing the results from more than a hundred actual search engines, ranging from large general web search engines such as Google and Bing to small domain-specific engines. We discuss the design and analyze the effect of several sampling methods. For a set of test queries, we collected relevance judgements for the top 10 results of each search engine. The dataset is publicly available and is useful for researchers interested in resource selection for web search collections, result merging and size estimation of uncooperative resources.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
Place of PublicationNew York, NY, USA
PublisherACM
Pages1874-1878
Number of pages5
ISBN (Print)978-1-4503-1156-4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012

Publication series

NameCIKM '12
PublisherACM

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