Finding relevant search engines results: a minimax linear programming approach

Abstract

For a submitted query to multiple search engines finding relevant results is an important task. This paper formulates the problem of aggregation and ranking of multiple search engines results in the form of a minimax linear programming model. Besides the novel application, this study detects the most relevant information among a return set of ranked lists of documents retrieved by distinct search engines. Furthermore, two numerical examples aree used to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed approach.

Keywords:

• linear programming
• search engine
• metasearch
• relevancy index

Acknowledgements

The authors are extremely grateful to three anonymous referees and the editor of JORS for their constructive comments and suggestions that have been very useful in improving the presented paper.