Querying multiple document collections across the Internet
Luis Gravano · 1998
Information sources are available everywhere, both within the internal networks of organizations and on the Internet. The source contents are often hidden behind search interfaces and models that vary from source to source. Furthermore, these sources are usually numerous, and users cannot evaluate their queries over all of them. Consequently, it is crucial for users to have metasearchers, which are services that provide unified query interfaces to multiple information sources. Given a user query, the metasearcher first chooses the best sources to evaluate the query. Second, the metasearcher submits the query to these sources. Finally, the metasearcher merges the query results from the sources. To address the first task, we designed GlOSS, a scalable system that chooses the best document sources for a query. The GlOSS information about each source is orders of magnitude smaller than the source contents. To address the other two tasks above and to facilitate the extraction of the GlOSS i...