The MetaCrawler Softbot is a parallel Web search service that has been available at the University of Washington since June of 1995. It provides users with a single interface with which they can query popular general-purpose Web search services, such as Lycos[6] and AltaVista[1], and has some sophisticated features that allow it to obtain results of much higher quality than simply regurgitating...

Standard Web search services, though useful, are far from ideal. There are over a dozen di erent search services currently in existence, each with a unique interface and a database covering a di erent portion of the Web. As a result, users are forced to repeatedly try and retry their queries across di erent services. Furthermore, the services return many responses that are irrelevant, outdated,...

Towards Comprehensive Web Search by Erik Warren Selberg Chair of Supervisory Committee Associate Professor Oren Etzioni Department of Computer Science & Engineering The World Wide Web has rapidly become a key medium for information dissemination to all members of society. However, its disorganized nature and sheer size can make it difficult for people to find information. Web search services ha...

This paper describes an information broker capable of retrieving texts from the WWWeb by using con-textual pointers. The broker is a client for TextNet, a text-based knowledge base using WordNet as a lexical backbone and a contextual inference scheme motivated by abductive semantic connectivity. The ability to obtain relevant information from the web is determined by a combination of (1) the te...

This paper proposes that for scientific and technical information resources, a well-structured and high-quality metadata record contains enough information to find that resource on the Internet, and as a consequence, no additional human labour is needed to create or maintain any links. Research was performed by creating a control group of records from the Online Catalogue of the Food and Agricu...

Considering today’s web scenario, there is a need of effective and meaningful search over the web which is provided by Semantic Web. Existing search engines are keyword based. They are vulnerable in answering intelligent queries from the user due to the dependence of their results on information available in web pages. While semantic search engines provides efficient and relevant results as the...

Compares the searching capabilities of two search engines (Google and Yahoo) and two metasearch engines (Metacrawler and Dogpile) on the basis of the precision value and relative recall. Fifteen queries which represented a broad range of library and information science topics were selected and each query was submitted to the search engines and metasearch engines. The first 100 results in each s...

PURPOSE Flashes of light and floaters are most commonly caused by posterior vitreous separation but may be associated with sight-threatening disorders. Prevention of severe sequelae requires prompt dilated eye examination. Thus, information dissemination is crucial. This study aimed to evaluate the quality of information about floaters and light flashes available for patients on the Internet. ...