Proceedings of National Conference on Challenges & Opportunities in Information Technology (COIT-2007) RIMT-IET, Mandi Gobindgarh. March 23, 2007. 236 Fusion Based Metasearch: An improved approach towards efficient Web searching Harmunish Taneja 1 , Karan Madan 2 1 Department of Computer Science & Applications, Kurukshetra University Kurukshetra Seth Jai Parkash Mukand Lal Inst. of Engg. & Tech.- Radaur, Haryana, harmunish.taneja@gmail.com 2 Department of Computer Science & Applications, Kurukshetra University Kurukshetra Seth Jai Parkash Mukand Lal Inst. of Engg. & Tech.- Radaur, Haryana, karanmadan99@yahoo.com Abstract With the immense growth of information on the web, it is difficult for the user to find the relevant information related to the area concerned. This expansion in amount of information, triggered by growing number of search engines databases, web directories, digital libraries and other information repositories on the World Wide Web has necessitated easy, effective and efficient access to relevant information from multiple information resources. But this gigantic growth compels us to see little through the conventional search engines, towards metasearch engines. To meet this necessity, search engines have been developed to help users to retrieve information of their interest from the Web in real time. Certain limitations related with conventional search engines viz. smaller exposure of Web and suitably low retrieval effectiveness lead to development of fusion based search engines that are commercially termed as Metasearch engines. So the thirst necessitates the use of metasearch engines for easy, effective and efficient access to relevant information from multiple sources. Metasearch engines allow the clients, an automatically joined and fused access to multiple independent search engines. This paper describes various issues belonging to this fascinating approach in the form of building Metasearch engine and other related issues. KEYWORDS: Information Retrieval, Metasearch, Metasearch Engine, Search Engines, World Wide Web 1. INTRODUCTION Web can be viewed as a huge, almost complete but unstructured database distributed across the world. This nature of the Web as expected inspires the users to search the Web. In this paper, we are interested in the case, where a user searches the Web for data that fulfills his information needs. Many organizations have their own search engines. There is reason to believe that all these special-purpose and general search engines combined together can provide a better coverage of the Web than a conventional search engines. An alternative approach for providing the search capability for the entire Web is to combine many search engines known as metasearch engine. A metasearch engine is a system that supports unified access to multiple search engines. It does not maintain its own index on web pages but a metasearch engine often maintains information about each underlying local search engine in order to provide better service to the user. When a metasearch engine receives a user query, it first passes the query to the appropriate local search engines, and then collects the results from its local search engines. In addition to the increased search coverage of the Web, another advantage of using such a metasearch engine over a general-purpose search engine is that it is easier to keep index data up to date as each local search engine covers only a small portion of the Web. In addition to this, running a metasearch engine requires much smaller investment in hardware in comparison to running a large general search engine which uses thousands of computers. Web searching is usually carried out in three ways. First, using search engines that index a portion of the Web as text databases. Second, using the Web directories, which categorize selected Web documents? Both of these are practiced and popular ways of Web searching. Another, not yet fully recognized, is using the hyperlink structure. This paper begins with shedding light upon the basic issues and the scope of search engines in the purview of Information Retrieval (IR) and then switches to an emerging relatively new trend in Web searching i.e. Metasearch engines. Search engine crawls the Web by downloading and indexing pages in order to allow full- text searching. Besides millions of specialty search engines, there are many large scale general purpose search engines; unfortunately none of them comes close to indexing the entire Web [16]. MSEs are information retrieval systems based on fusion approach capable of automatically and simultaneously querying several autonomous search engines, interpreting and merging the result sets retrieved fro m them into a single unified result set. This unified result set is re- organized and re- ranked where after it is displayed to user in appropriate format. MSEs allow the web user to overcome the limitations of individual search engines by allowing them automatic and unified access to multiple independent search engines for harnessing the quality of each individual. This data fusion approach acts as a global interface between user and set of search engines. This is the appropriate way to take advantage of the benefits of these individual search engines by using them in a combined fashion.