Towards automatic incorporation of search engines into a large-scale metasearch engine

A metasearch engine supports unified access to multiple component search engines. To build a very large-scale metasearch engine that can access up to hundreds of thousands of component search engines, one major challenge is to incorporate large numbers of autonomous search engines in a highly effective manner. To solve this problem, we propose automatic search engine discovery, automatic search engine connection, and automatic search engine result extraction techniques. Experiments indicate that these techniques are highly effective and efficient.