A new multi-search engine for querying data through an Internet search service on CORBA

Search engines are important but generally far from ideal tools of the World Wide Web (WWW). Many researchers therefore prefer to use meta-brokers to construct multi-search engines (MSE). However, these have no uniform programming interfaces, which makes tying them with other search engines difficult. Moreover, for an application that needs a search service capability, querying them is difficult. To reduce that difficulty, we propose in this paper an Internet search service (ISS) based on common object request broker architecture (CORBA) that follows the style of common object service specification (COSS). We design a multi-search engine based on ISS, which we term Octopus. For a system developer, because of its uniformity of interface, Octopus easily ties with any search engine. Equally, for an application programmer, the ISS offers a clear interface for application programs to search for information or mine data from the Internet. We demonstrate our approach to designing multi-search engines through ISS by tying two search engine agents, Yahoo and Alta Vista, with Octopus and show how CORBA clients query them. Programmers may use this interface to construct their search engine agents or query a search engine agent in their applications. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.