Web based collection selection using singular value decomposition

As the number of electronic data collections available on the Internet increases, so does the difficulty of finding the right collection for a given query. Often the first time user is overwhelmed by the array of options available, and wastes time hunting through pages of collection names, followed by time reading results pages after doing an ad-hoc search. Automatic collection selection methods try to solve this problem by suggesting the best subset of collections to search based on a query. This is of importance to fields containing large number of electronic collections, which undergo frequent change, and collections that cannot be fully indexed using traditional methods such as spiders. We present a solution to this problem of selecting the best collections and reducing the number of collections needing to be searched. Preliminary tests of the system, conducted on Web search engines, suggest that this solves much of the Web based Collection selection problem.