Designing a Revenue Mechanism for Federated Search Engines

Federated search engines constitute a new class of search computing paradigms whereby a multi–domain query is decomposed in a number of single–domain queries, each one addressed by a domain–specific content service provider. The paradigm provides a number of advantages, in particular the possibility to discover more pertinent information by scouring the deep Web and to find automatically correlations among the service providers’ results. In our work, we focus on the design of a revenue mechanism for such paradigm. This task, although being of extraordinary importance, has not received enough attention in the literature so far. In particular, in this paper we describe a revenue mechanism in terms of business model, specifying who pays and when, and microeconomic model, specifying how the optimal payment can be computed. Futhermore, we discuss its properties.