University of Houston
Department of Computer Science


In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science


Chuandong Xu
will defend his thesis


Personal Web Search Assistant: a Meta-search engine


Abstract

Currently there are more than 2,500 Web search services on the Internet. These services are the starting points for users to seek information on the Internet. However, search services have some limitations, such as low coverage of Web pages, poor precision, out-of-date database, etc. Meta-search engines are developed to solve some of these problems, but they also have their own problems, such as the limited ability to support all of the query language features for each engine, unable to manipulate search results, etc.

In this project, we designed a Personal Web Search Assistant (PWSA), a meta-search engine that solves some of the above problems. PWSA communicates with the underlying web search engines using Common Gateway Interface (CGI). When PWSA receives a new query, it sends the query to the selected search engines, then parses the returned HTML pages for URL links, and displays the compiled URL links to a user in HTML format. PWSA has most of the features of the ordinary meta-search engines, such as supporting multiple search engines, converting user query into the syntax of each underlying search engine, and presenting search results in a uniform way. Furthermore, it provides users the capabilities to save the search results and manipulate the results as sets.

PWSA provides a framework for improvements in Web searching with respect to building user search accounts, reducing user search effort and personalizing user search.


Date: Monday, April 23, 2001
Time: 3:00 PM
Place: 550-PGH


Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Stephen Huang