Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Metasearch: Data Fusion For Document Retrieval, Mark H. Montague

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

The metasearch problem is to optimally merge the ranked lists output by an arbitrary number of search systems into one ranked list. In this work: (1) We show that metasearch improves upon not just the raw performance of the input search engines, but also upon the consistency of the input search engines from query to query. (2) We experimentally prove that simply weighting input systems by their average performance can dramatically improve fusion results. (3) We show that score normalization is an important component of a metasearch engine, and that dependence upon statistical outliers appears to be the problem with …