Information fusion with ProFusion

: The explosive growth of the World Wide Web, and the resulting information overload, has led to a miniexplosion in World Wide Web search engines. This mini-explosion, in turn, led to the development of ProFusion, a meta search engine. Educators, like other users, do not have the time to evaluate multiple search engines to knowledgeably select the best for their uses. Nor do they have the time to submit each query to multiple search engines and wade through the resulting flood of good information, duplicated information, irrelevant information, and missing documents. ProFusion sends user queries to multiple underlying search engines in parallel, retrieves and merges the resulting URLs. It identifies and removes duplicates and creates one relevance-ranked list. If desired, the actual documents can be pre-fetched to remove yet more duplicates and broken links. ProFusion's performance has been compared to the individual search engines and other meta searchers, demonstrating its abili...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: WEBNET
• Authors: Susan Gauch, Guijun Wang
• Keywords: Multiple Search Engines, Search Engines, WEBNET 1996, WEBNET 2001, World Wide Web