1. Federated & Meta Search
What are they?
Environment
Library (institutional), Everywhere (Web)
Content
Web, Databases, Catalogs (books), (numerical) data
Users
Researchers, Students, Academics, Anyone
How are they used?
Comparing results
Widest possible information set for retrieval

2. Do you use Metasearch? For research? When shopping?
Research papers
General information seeking
When shopping?
Trips
Books
Technical support (help)?
What else?

3. What are Digital Libraries?
What’s not a digital library?
The Web, Lexis-Nexis, UTNetCAT, ACM DigLib, YouTube, Amazon.com, your laptop’s hard drive?
Users think they’re content
Librarians think they’re institutions & services
Are they digital content only?
An easier, digital way to find physical content or help?
“Content, collections & communities”
How do all of these fit together for Info Retrieval?
Organizing everything for effective retrieval seems to be the key challenge
Making everything (possible) searchable is the key feature for users.
Metasearch is the key to Digital Libraries

4. Digital Library = Virtual Library?
Freely available Web content is a pretty good digital library
Your own content is a good library (for re-finding content)
Databases & Indexes are traditional library content. Now more digital
Should it matter where the content is?
Costs?
Findability?
Scalability?

5. Federated Search Everything is accessible
Legal issues & pricing is coordinated
Clustering & redundant information is processed accordingly (cheapest first?)
Query syntax is universal & transformed for each dataset
Databases, catalogs & text
Relevancy is weighted & precise
Multiple vendors & open access sources
A balance? How “deep” in the deep Web?

6. Web Dynamics & Metasearch
Different documents have many different characteristics
Web documents vs. other types of content
Links, Metadata, Genre, Dynamically changing
How well is the Web indexed?
In terms of completeness? 60%?
Metasearch is an index of the indices
Parallel queries are not always the same
Special purpose search engines a better idea?
Google Scholar vs. Google
Is Personalized (meta) search the answer?
Special purpose is your purpose
Relevance, ranking & importance
Pricing, availability, locality

7. Categorizing Web search results
The interface on metasearch may be more important to users than the content
Understanding results over finding (all) content
Show results in context - use categories
Understanding searches
Building a taxonomy for results
Customized for each result set?
Show when there aren’t any results
When results don’t rank high enough
Do we need more overviews for results?
Visualization for clustering

8. Category Building for Search
How deep, shallow, lean or rich should categories be?
Should the content be the main criteria for categories?
Host, links, user perspective, genre?
What features of content should be used to cluster results?
For a metasearch?

9. Fast-feature categorization
Online lean techniques
DNS, time visited, format, language, size, index date
Online rich techniques
Fit to existing categories such as ODP, Yahoo!, Music, Gov, Inventory
Offline techniques
Directory hierarchy
Query probing
Results, pages, words, (category) nodes, depth & type of hierarchy
Understanding the content is critical

10. Yahoo! Cataloging the Web
A non-automated, technique
How do information professionals build an “index” of the Web?
Cataloging applies to the Web
Indexing with synonyms
Browsing indexes vs searching them
Comprehensive index not the goal
Quality
Information Density
Yahoo’s own ontology – points to site for full info
Subject Trees with aliases to other locations
“More like this” comparisons as checksums

11. Yahoo uses tools for indexing

12. More metasearch tools Scroogle Thumshots.org Ranking Jux2
Search Engine Relationship Chart