Integrated Search Engine

Searching for information has become an important part of the Internet life. New and more powerful search engines are being built every day for public use. Even though the combined power of these engines are far more advanced than their past alternatives, an average user does not seem to be benefiting fully from the state-of-the-art of search technologies. In this paper, we develop an integrated search engine architecture called I.SEE (Integrated SEarch Engine) that combines the capabilities of search engines. I.SEE facilitates construction of complex search queries with the help of a uniform interface, transforms the queries by relaxing them when necessary to queries that can be supported by search engines, translates relaxed queries to the specific query language syntax used by different systems and executes multiple search requests in parallel to improve query response time. I.SEE is a flexible and extensible system that adapts to the changes in the search engines and provides users with customization options for developing specialized query interfaces. A current version of the system is available at http://www.cs.rpi.edu./research/isee/