| The goal of this research is to develop a pilot system which will automatically browse the online information, filter and display it, bringing the information to the user rather than requiring the user to seek it out. In the first phase of this project, we developed a meta-search engine, ProFusion, to retrieve, process, and merge search results from multiple search engines. 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. In future, actual documents can also be analyzed to improve ranking. The goal of this phase is to make ProFusion an intelligent yet efficient information filtering and dissemination system. |
