Determining result quality for vertical result merging

Vertical search engines (VSEs) serves as a good alternative to irrelevant results retrieved by general-purpose search engines. However, a best VSE does not exist for all VSE domains. VSEs can have distributed and disjoint information within a specific domain. We introduce this emerging issue, vertical result merging. We identify issues uniquely related to vertical result merging and present a domain-oriented re-ranking method. We also develop a novel content quality measure to assess the usefulness of our approach as compared to traditional metasearch result merging.