Meta Search Engines Taly Sharon

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar2 Contents Search Engines (SEs) generations Meta Search Engine (MSE) Why use several SEs (Motivation)? Highlighted MSEs (Mamma, Dogpile, Vivisimo, Ixquick, KartOO) Hebrew MSEs MSE comparison When to use MSE – pros and cons How to choose MSE?

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar3 Search Engines Generations 1st Generation - Basic SEs: 2nd Generation - Meta SEs: 3rd Generation - Popularity SEs:

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar4 2nd Generation SEs - MetaSEs Using several SEs in parallel. The results are filtered, ranked and presented to the user as a uniformed list. The ranking is a combination of the number of sources each page appeared in, and the ranking in each source.

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar5 Meta SE is a Meta-Service It doesn ’ t use an Index/database of its own. It uses other external search services that provide the information necessary to fulfill user queries.

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar6 Meta Search Engine MetaCrawler YahooWeb CrawlerOpen TextLycosInfoSeekInktomiGalaxyExcite Google · Yahoo · Jeeves Ask About · LookSmart · Overture FindWhat

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar7 Premises of a Meta SE No single search is sufficient. Problem in expressing the query. Low quality references can be detected.

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar8 Why use Several SEs? Search Engines differ more than we think!

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar9 Overlap between Google and Yahoo Source: Jux2 analysis of 500 top search terms, April

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar10 Who Overlaps Whom?

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar11 Try it jux2

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar12 MSE - Motivation 1.The number and variety of SEs. 2.Each SE provides an incomplete snapshot of Web. 3.Users are forced to try and retry their queries across different SEs. 4.Each SE has its own interface. 5.Irrelevant, outdated or unavailable responses. 6.Each query is independent. 7.No individual customization. 8.The result is not homogenized.

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar13 Problems of MSEs No advanced search options. Using the lowest common denominator. Sponsored results from the SEs are not highlighted.

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar14 Highlighted MSEs

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar15 Mamma

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar16 rSort: Mamma ’ s Ranking Algorithm Each duplicate search result is considered a 'vote' for that result. Pages with the highest number of votes go at the top of our result set the method of voting we use is a simplified version of the "Condorcet Method", named after the mathematician Marquis de Condorcet who invented this voting procedure in the 18th century. One of the big advantages of this ranking method is the elimination of search engine spam. Spammers often have difficulty spamming more than one engine at the same time, as different spamming methods must be used for each search engine. Spam results will tend to receive fewer votes from multiple sources. A spammer may have top ranking on one search engine, but they won't achieve it on Mamma unless they're able to spam ALL of our sources, an insurmountable task for even the best spammer.

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar17 Dogpile

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar18 Dogpile Advanced

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar19 Dogpile Advanced

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar20 Dogpile Advanced

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar21 Dogpile Advanced

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar22 Dogpile Preferences

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar23 Dogpile Preferences

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar24 Vivisimo/Clusty Viv í simo supports the most advanced features of the major search engines using one Viv í simo syntax, which follows the most standard conventions. Viv í simo translates your query into the corresponding syntax of each underlying search engine. Also, Viv í simo only queries the search engines that support your chosen syntax.

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar25 Clusty

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar26 Vivisimo Advanced

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar27 Vivisimo Advanced

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar28 Ixquick

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar29 Ixquick

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar30 Ixquick

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar31 KartOO – Visual MSE

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar32 MetaSEs in Hebrew: Clusty Start

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar33 Clusty

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar34 Clusty

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar35 When to use a MSE? When single Basic-SE fails to provide good results. One-stop shopping - prefer to search multiple SEs/sites at once to get blended ranked results (so as to save effort/time). Searching for multi-faceted topics. Want to get clustered results to focus search on the relevant keywords. Looking for current events/news.

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar36 For quick and dirty searches. If you want an answer fast, you may have better luck querying multiple engines simultaneously. For broad and shallow searches. Meta searching is an excellent approach if the purpose of your search is to get an overview of a topic. To assess potential keywords for an unfamiliar subject. What better way to discover search terms than to see how they appear in a cross section of documents across the web? To see how different engines handle the same query. This is an excellent way to get to know the "personalities" of different search engines -- their strengths, weaknesses, and types of queries they handle best.

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar37 MSE pros Useful when you want to retrieve a relatively small number of relevant results an excellent choice for obscure topics a good option when you are not having luck finding what you want when you search appropriate when you want to get an overall picture of what is available on the Web on your topic

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar38 MSE cons use is limited primarily to simple queries little or no field searching is available most services return a limited number of results that do not represent the totality of results from any source engine Sponsored results may are not highlighted (even though probably not first)

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar39 How to Choose your MetaSE Search engines used Operators supported Special features Speed Presentation

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar40 Meta-SEs Features Chart Red – not working

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar41 Vivisimo: link: Not supported?

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar42

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar43 Practical Recommendations  Use Ixquick for fast results and maximal syntax flexibility  Use Vivisimo/Clusty (start) for Clustering and/or Hebrew  Use Dogpile to include Google+Yahoo!, date range, or spelling corrections.  Use none for non-MSE tasks (see MSE cons) …

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar44 Exercises Find a presentation by Mary Ellen Bates Learn about the litrature of Pablo Neruda from a research/educational point of view Hint , query: +domain:edu +literature +"pablo neruda “ Explore the different meanings of Jaguar

T.Sharon Search Engine Seminar45 Bibliography earch.html earch.html engines.htm engines.htm er.pdf er.pdf metacrawler.pdf metacrawler.pdf