Searchsense: A Semantic Meta Search Engine

Abstract

Despite the recent advancements in information retrieval research and in online search engines, satisfying the needs of search engines users remains largely challenging. This is due to many reasons including the size and richness of information available over the internet and the semantic gap between the intention of search engine user and how search engines understand that intention.This article highlights the main reasons for ineffective web searches and sheds the lights on the status of ongoing research stream, the SearchSense project, which focuses on improving the effectiveness of search engines in satisfying users' needs. The research has been carried out through multiple projects that were implemented over several years with main overall focus on designing an effective semantic search engine. SearchSense employs the semantic technology to bridge the gap between search engines and their users and to provide a better presentation of web search results. SearchSense could be used as a Meta Semantic Search Engine on top of regular search engine or could easily be incorporated in any information retrieval system.The article describes the overall framework of the solution and outlines its main components. Details on the technicalities of the solution components are presented in relevant articles. The article also provided a summary of the results of the experiments that have been conducted to test the effectiveness of the solution.