Meta-Searching Chinese Health Information on the Internet

Searching for health information on the Internet is a popular and important activity. However, most Chinese medical sites do not have wealthy content to satisfy all searchers. In this paper we propose an approach to meta-search Chinese health information on the Internet. Our system queries several general-purpose search engines and merges the returned search results into one ranked list. A major issue of developing a meta-search engine is how to integrate search results of different search engines. We propose a merging strategy that uses five features to estimate the merging score of a result entity. All result entities reported by source search engines are merged into one ranked list according to their merging scores. We intend to generate a high precision ranked list by raising the ranks of the documents that are in the medical domain. We conduct a search task to evaluate the effectiveness of our system. Experimental results show that our meta-search engine performs better than Google Web search engine. The proposed merging method can provide better search results for health information seekers.