Text and Image Metasearch on the Web

As the Web continues to increase in size, the relative coverage of Web search engines is decreasing, and search tools that combine the results of multiple search engines are becoming more valuable. This paper provides details of the text and image metasearch functions of the Inquirus search engine developed at the NEC Research Institute. For text metasearch, we describe features including the use of link information in metasearch, and provide statistics on the usage and performance of Inquirus and the Web search engines. For image metasearch, Inquirus queries multiple image search engines on the Web, downloads the actual images, and creates image thumbnails for display to the user. Inquirus handles image search engines that return direct links to images, and engines that return links to HTML pages. For the engines that return HTML pages, Inquirus analyzes the text on the pages in order to predict which images are most likely to correspond to the query. The individual image search engines tend to excel at different classes of queries, and the combination of engines is surprisingly effective at finding images corresponding to a given query. Both the text and image metasearch functions of Inquirus are surprisingly fast, and we describe the parallel architecture of the engine that provides this efficiency.