INQUIRUS, THE NECI META SEARCH ENGINE

World Wide Web (WWW) search engines (e.g. AltaVista, Infoseek, HotBot, etc.) have a number of deficiencies including: periods of downtime, l ow coverage of the WWW, inconsistent and inefficient user interfaces, out of date databases, poor relevancy ranking and precision, and diffi culties with spamming techniques. Meta search engines have been introd uced which address some of these and other difficulties in searching t he WWW. However, current meta search engines retain some of these diff iculties and may also introduce their own problems (e.g. reduced relev ance because one or more of the search engines returns results with po or relevance). We present Inquirus, the NECI meta search engine, which addresses many of the deficiencies in current techniques. Rather than working with the list of documents and summaries returned by search e ngines, as current meta search engines typically do, the Inquirus meta search engine works by downloading and analyzing the individual docum ents. The Inquirus meta search engine makes improvements over existing search engines in a number of areas, e.g.: more useful document summa ries incorporating query term context, identification of both pages wh ich no longer exist and pages which no longer contain the query terms, advanced detection of duplicate pages, improved document ranking usin g proximity information, dramatically improved precision for certain q ueries by using specific expressive forms, and quick jump links and hi ghlighting when viewing the full documents. (C) 1998 Published by Else vier Science B.V. All rights reserved.