Many valuable text databases on the web have noncrawlable contents that are “hidden” behind
search interfaces. Metasearchers are helpful tools for searching over multiple such “hidden-web”
text databases at once through a unified query interface. An important step in the metasearching
process is database selection, or determining which databases are the most relevant for a given
user query. The state-of-the-art database selection techniques rely on statistical summaries of the
database contents, generally including the database vocabulary and associated word frequencies.
Unfortunately, hidden-web text databases typically do not export such summaries, so previous research
has developed algorithms for constructing approximate content summaries from document
samples extracted from the databases via querying.We present a novel “focused-probing” sampling
algorithm that detects the topics covered in a database and adaptively extracts documents that
are representative of the topic coverage of the database. Our algorithm is the first to construct
content summaries that include the frequencies of the words in the database. Unfortunately, Zipf’s
law practically guarantees that for any relatively large database, content summaries built from
moderately sized document samples will fail to cover many low-frequency words; in turn, incomplete
content summaries might negatively affect the database selection process, especially for short
queries with infrequent words. To enhance the sparse document samples and improve the database
selection decisions, we exploit the fact that topically similar databases tend to have similar
vocabularies, so samples extracted from databases with a similar topical focus can complement
each other. We have developed two database selection algorithms that exploit this observation.
The first algorithm proceeds hierarchically and selects the best categories for a query, and then
sends the query to the appropriate databases in the chosen categories. The second algorithm uses “shrinkage,” a statistical technique for improving parameter estimation in the face of sparse data,
to enhance the database content summaries with category-specific words.We describe how to modify
existing database selection algorithms to adaptively decide (at runtime) whether shrinkage is
beneficial for a query. A thorough evaluation over a variety of databases, including 315 real web databases
as well as TREC data, suggests that the proposed sampling methods generate high-quality
content summaries and that the database selection algorithms produce significantly more relevant
database selection decisions and overall search results than existing algorithms.NYU, Stern School of Business, IOMS Department, Center for Digital Economy Researc