Automatic Estimation of Query Syntax for Search Sites

Abstract

Pan-Yellow-Sea : International Workshop on Information Technologies for Network Era, March 7-8, 2002, Saga, JapanGeneral search engines like Yahoo! and Google are indispensable to cope with the flood of information on the Internet. But the quality of search results is not always good enough due to the vast size of the search space that these engines cover. On the other hand, many databases are becoming searchable on the Web, and many companies and organizations are providing their own search facility on the Web. We call such a site a search site. We are developing a system that integrates such search sites. To integrate these search sites we need to conceal the difference of the query syntax from the user. But the query syntax of these search sites vary. In this paper we propose a method that automatically determines the query syntax