A new multi-search engine for querying data through an Internet search service on CORBA Yue-Shan Chang a, * , Shyan-Ming Yuan a , Winston Lo b a Department of Computer and Information Science, National Chiao Tung University, 1001 TA Hsueh Road, Hsin-Chu 30050, Taiwan, ROC b Department of Computer and Information Science, Tung Hai University, Taichung, Taiwan, ROC Received 14 February 2000; received in revised form 5 May 2000; accepted 19 May 2000 Abstract Search engines are important but generally far from ideal tools of the World Wide Web (WWW). Many researchers therefore prefer to use meta-brokers to construct multi-search engines (MSE). However, these have no uniform pro- gramming interfaces, which makes tying them with other search engines dicult. Moreover, for an application that needs a search service capability, querying them is dicult. To reduce that diculty, we propose in this paper an Internet search service (ISS) based on common object request broker architecture (CORBA) that follows the style of common object service speci®cation (COSS). We design a multi- search engine based on ISS, which we term Octopus. For a system developer, because of its uniformity of interface, Octopus easily ties with any search engine. Equally, for an application programmer, the ISS oers a clear interface for application programs to search for information or mine data from the Internet. We demonstrate our approach to designing multi-search engines through ISS by tying two search engine agents, Yahoo and AltaVista, with Octopus and show how CORBA clients query them. Programmers may use this interface to construct their search engine agents or query a search engine agent in their applications. Ó 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Internet; Multi-search service; Search engine; World Wide Web; CORBA 1. Introduction Recent advances in the computer network and the Internet, have given the Web increasing pop- ularity, but the growth in Web sites has made searching the Internet a more involved task, with the result that search engines now claim more importance as tools, and their number increases accordingly. Standard search engines, for example, Yahoo, 1 AltaVista, 2 Lycos, 3 InfoSeek, 4 Galaxy, 5 and WebCrawler, 6 may help users ®nd what they Computer Networks 34 (2000) 467±480 www.elsevier.com/locate/comnet * Corresponding author. Tel.: +886-3-557-2930; fax: +886-3- 559-1402. E-mail address: ysc@mhit.edu.tw (Y.-S. Chang). 1 http://www.yahoo.com. 2 http://www.altavista.digital.com. 3 http://www.lycos.com. 4 http://www.infoseek.com. 5 http://galaxy.einet.net/galaxy.html. 6 http://webcrawler.com. 1389-1286/00/$ - see front matter Ó 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 1 3 8 9 - 1 2 8 6 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 1 3 1 - 6