This paper provides an overview of a technique for extracting information from the Web search interfaces of e-commerce search engines that is useful for supporting automatic search interface integration. In particular, we discuss how to group elements and labels on a search interface into attributes and how to derive certain meta-information for each attribute. Categories & Subject Descriptors H.3.5 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Online Information Services ? Commercial Services, Web-based Services. H.5.2 [Information Interface and Representation]: User Interfaces ? User Interface Management Systems. General Terms Algorithms, Management, Performance, Design. Keywords Search interface representation, Search interface extraction, Search engine, Metasearch engine.
Hai He, Weiyi Meng, Clement T. Yu, Zonghuan Wu