Metasearch Engine Architecture

Abstract

A metasearch engine is a search system that provides a unified way to access multiple existing search engines. It is based on the concept of metasearch, which is the paradigm of searching multiple data sources on the fly. Metasearch has a meaning very similar to federated search, and these two phrases are sometimes used interchangeably. A metasearch engine is sometimes also called a search broker because it acts as a “middleman” between users searching for information and a set of search engines (Craswell, N., 2000). Metasearch engine is also closely related to distributed information retrieval (Craswell, N., 2000) or federated search system (Shokouhi and Si, 2011) although there are some differences between them that will be discussed in Section 2.1.