A Study of Various Result Merging Strategies for a Meta Search Engine

As the amount of data is growing day by day, the sources for these data are also growing simultaneously and to search through this very data, we need the use of search engines. Since each search engine is limited to its confined set of data, it would be even better to make use of a Meta search engine which will give us more relevant results than the ones obtained from any single search engine. It acts as an interface that provides the user with a single view from the various underlying search engines. The data is collected from these underlying search engines after they are accessed with the processed query from the Meta search engine. The collected data is merged using an algorithm and the algorithm will be a major factor in giving the best possible results. In this paper, we are going to discuss about the various existing metasearch engines and the different merging techniques and their approaches.