World Wide Web (WWW) search engines (e.g. AltaVista, Infoseek, HotBot, etc.) have a number of deficiencies including: periods of downtime, low coverage of the WWW, inconsistent and inefficient user interfaces, out of date databases, poor relevancy ranking and precision, and difficulties with spamming techniques. Meta search engines have been introduced which address some of these and other difficulties in searching the WWW. However, current meta search engines retain some of these difficulties and may also introduce their own problems (e.g. reduced relevance because one or more of the search engines returns results with poor relevance). We present Inquirus, the NECI meta search engine, which addresses many of the deficiencies in current techniques. Rather than working with the list of documents and summaries returned by search engines, as current meta search engines typically do, the Inquirus meta search engine works by downloading and analyzing the individual documents. The Inquirus meta search engine makes improvements over existing search engines in a number of areas, e.g.: more useful document summaries incorporating query term context, identification of both pages which no longer exist and pages which no longer contain the query terms, advanced detection of duplicate pages, improved document ranking using proximity information, dramatically improved precision for certain queries by using specific expressive forms, and quick jump links and highlighting when viewing the full documents. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
