COMPARATIVE WEB SEARCH SYSTEM AND METHOD
First Claim
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1. A method performing a comparative web search comprising:
- providing a meta-search engine in communication with a plurality of web-based search engines;
providing said meta-search engine with a query, a search mode, and a selected set of said web-based search engines, said meta-search engine using said query to search for documents on the selected set of said web-based search engines;
retrieving automatically search results from each of the web-based search engines in the selected set in the form of at least web snippets or documents from each member of the selected set of said web-based search engines and using the search result as raw data;
providing automatically the raw data to a data pre-processing module which automatically removes stop words and HTML tags, and applies a stemming algorithm, resulting in pre-processed data;
providing automatically the pre-processed data to a comparison engine, said comparison engine performing an object level comparison or a thematic level comparison depending on which comparison is specified in the search mode, said comparison resulting in a plurality of result sets from the selected set of said web-based search engines;
determining automatically logical relationships between each of the plurality of result sets and providing a results comparison of the determined logical relationships;
organizing automatically the search results in ranked lists when the object level comparison is performed by the comparison engine and labeled hierarchical clusters when the thematic level comparison is performed by the comparison engine, said organizing resulting in organized search results; and
outputting the results comparison and the organized search results for viewing.
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Abstract
A system and method for a comparative web search engines, search result summarization, web snippet processing, comparison analysis, information visualization, meta-clustering, and quantitative evaluation of web snippet quality are disclosed. The present invention extends the capabilities of web searching and informational retrieval by providing a succinct comparative summary of search results at either the object or thematic levels.
88 Citations
20 Claims
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1. A method performing a comparative web search comprising:
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providing a meta-search engine in communication with a plurality of web-based search engines; providing said meta-search engine with a query, a search mode, and a selected set of said web-based search engines, said meta-search engine using said query to search for documents on the selected set of said web-based search engines; retrieving automatically search results from each of the web-based search engines in the selected set in the form of at least web snippets or documents from each member of the selected set of said web-based search engines and using the search result as raw data; providing automatically the raw data to a data pre-processing module which automatically removes stop words and HTML tags, and applies a stemming algorithm, resulting in pre-processed data; providing automatically the pre-processed data to a comparison engine, said comparison engine performing an object level comparison or a thematic level comparison depending on which comparison is specified in the search mode, said comparison resulting in a plurality of result sets from the selected set of said web-based search engines; determining automatically logical relationships between each of the plurality of result sets and providing a results comparison of the determined logical relationships; organizing automatically the search results in ranked lists when the object level comparison is performed by the comparison engine and labeled hierarchical clusters when the thematic level comparison is performed by the comparison engine, said organizing resulting in organized search results; and outputting the results comparison and the organized search results for viewing. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20)
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- 10. The method of claim 10, wherein the cluster labeling comprises finding at least two base clusters with maximum overlap between keywords and merging keywords if one of the at least two base clusters is a subset of ones of the at least two base clusters.
Specification