Result merging strategies for a current news metasearcher

Metasearching of online current news services is a potentially useful Web application of distributed information retrieval techniques. We constructed a realistic current news test collection using the results obtained from 15 current news Web sites (including ABC News, BBC and AllAfrica) in response to 107 topical queries. Results were judged for relevance by independent assessors. Online news services varied considerably both in the usefulness of the results sets they returned and also in the amount of information they provided which could be exploited by a metasearcher. Using the current news test collection we compared a range of different merging methods. We found that a low-cost merging scheme based on a combination of available evidence (title, summary, rank and server usefulness) worked almost as well as merging based on downloading and rescoring the actual news articles. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.