Metasearch information fusion using linear programming

¹ Postgraduate Engineering Centre, Islamic Azad University, South Tehran Branch, Tehran, Iran
gamin@azad.ac.ir
² Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham, UK
³ Department of Computer Engineering, Hashtgerd Branch, Islamic Azad University, Alborz, Iran

Received: 5 February 2011
Accepted: 10 September 2012

Abstract

For a specific query merging the returned results from multiple search engines, in the form of a metasearch aggregation, can provide significant improvement in the quality of relevant documents. This paper suggests a minimax linear programming (LP) formulation for fusion of multiple search engines results. The paper proposes a weighting method to include the importance weights of the underlying search engines. This is a two-phase approach which in the first phase a new method for computing the importance weights of the search engines is introduced and in the second stage a minimax LP model for finding relevant search engines results is formulated. To evaluate the retrieval effectiveness of the suggested method, the 50 queries of the 2002 TREC Web track were utilized and submitted to three popular Web search engines called Ask, Bing and Google. The returned results were aggregated using two exiting approaches, three high-performance commercial Web metasearch engines and our proposed technique. The efficiency of the generated lists was measured using TREC-Style Average Precision (TSAP). The new findings demonstrate that the suggested model improved the quality of merging considerably.