1. 1 Entity Search Engine: Towards Agile Best-Effort Information Integration over the Web Tao Cheng, Kevin Chang University Of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign CIDR 2007

2. 2 What have you been searching lately? What is the email of Gerhard Weikum? What papers appear in CIDR 2007? What is the due date of SIGMOD 2007? What is the price of “Canon PowerShot A400”? What is the customer service phone number of Amazon?

3. 3 Often times, we are looking for data Entities, instead of web pages.

4. 4 From pages to entities Entity SearchCurrent Search

5. 5 Entity Search - Agile best-effort integration Why agile?  No full relation extraction. Only entity level extraction. Scalable.  No fixed schema. Allow ad-hoc queries. Flexible. Why best-effort?  IR semantic of probabilistic ranking. Price: $119.95 $141.00 $142.00

6. 6 Why is Entity Search different? Probabilistic entities  A page is for sure a page. Contextual patterns  Match a page by its content. Holistic Aggregates  A page occurs only once. Associative results  We never search for pairs of pages.

7. 7 Demo. Online at: parrot.cs.uiuc.edu/entitysearch/ Three scenarios 1.CS scenario 2.Book scenario 3.Yellowpage scenario