A practical method for browsing a relational database using a standard search engine

Standard search engines have made the task of looking for information relatively easy and painless. In sharp contrast, most relational database interfaces make searching for information complicated and confusing - mainly because they require knowledge of specialized languages and the schema of the underlying data. In this paper, the authors describe a technique that supports the querying of a relational database (RDB) using a standard search engine. The technique involves expressing database queries through URLs. The technique also includes the development of a special wrapper that can process the URL-query and generate web pages that contain the answer to the query as well as links to additional data. By following these specialized links, a standard web crawler can index the RDB along with all the URL-queries. Once the content and their corresponding URL-queries have been indexed, a user may submit keyword queries through a standard search engine and receive the most current information in the database. Moreover, the system has been recently augmented with standard query syntax and metadata that allows users to formulate more expressive queries and search engines to index the database more efficiently. The authors describe the technique for making database content accessible to the web; they provide an evaluation of a prototype system that shows the correctness of our approach; and they present experimental results that show how adding metadata can improve the overall efficiency of the search.