Server selection is an important subproblem in distributed information retrieval (DIR) but has
commonly been studied with collections of more or less uniform size and with more or less …

A single search interface to all a person's digital resources, such as email archives,
corporate databases, websites, and subscription services, is appealing but a central index of …

Many server selection methods suitable for distributed information retrieval applications rely,
in the absence of cooperation, on the availability of unbiased samples of documents from …

Published methods for distributed information retrieval generally rely on cooperation from
search servers. But most real servers, particularly the tens of thousands available on the …

Modern techniques for distributed information retrieval use a set of documents sampled from
each server, but these samples have been underutilised in server selection. We describe a …

There was a proliferation of electronic information sources and search engines in the 1990s.
Many of these information sources became available through the ubiquitous interface of the …

Many current evaluation techniques for information retrieval, such as test collections and
simulations, are difficult to apply in situations where queries and preferred results are …

Search engines are among the most useful and high-profile resources on the Internet. The
problem of finding information on the Internet has been replaced with the problem of …

Meta-search, or the combination of the outputs of different search engines in response to a
query, has been shown to improve performance. Since the scores produced by different …

Recent increase in the number of search engines on the Web and the availability of meta
search engines that can query multiple search engines makes it important to find effective …