Inquiro.CL: a New Search Engine in Chile

In this paper we present a new online search engine developed in Chile: Inquiro.CL. This new search engine lets users search the Latin-American web (specifically, ten Spanishspeaking countries) by specifying their search domain (.cl, .com.ar, .com.mx, and the rest of Latin America). The structure is based on a distributed architecture that manages two document collections. The first is a cache of pages / sites that provides responses at low computational cost. The second is a general collection of documents that is visited when the user extends the search to the second results page or beyond. The index has been built using a multi-tier strategy, such that titles, URLs, headers, and complete site contents that make up the collection are cataloged in different indexes. The search engine uses a ranking function that combines various relevance measurements, among them user preferences, page rank, and text. Currently Inquiro’s main collection reaches more than 1,500,000 pages and approximately 35,000 sites. Experimental results show that the search engine is precise and compares favorably with similar search engines, reaching an average of over 60% precision in the top 5 rankings.