SBIR Phase II: Building a Large-Scale, Effective, Self-Maintainable and Customizable News Metasearch System

The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project develops a metasearch capability engineered for news searching. Searching is the second most popular activity on the Internet behind emailing and it already has a multibillion dollar advertising market. News searching accounts for a major percentage of all searches. News items are available from a large number of online sources but the current technologies for news search are not scalable to effectively cover all of these sources in a timely manner. This project is to develop a new technology to tackle this problem via constructing a large-scale, highly effective, self-maintainable and customizable news metasearch engine. High effectiveness is achieved by automatically selecting the most appropriate search engines to access for each user query and by effectively identifying the correct meanings of the terms in each query. By employing highly automated techniques to incorporate search engines, this system can automatically adapt to changes that are made to the connected search engines and users can customize by adding their favorite news search engines. Highly automated solutions employed herein reduce labor costs for development and maintenance, which translate to lower advertising costs and make online advertising more affordable for "small players", including small, local media Websites, individuals and small companies. This project advances large-scale information integration, large-scale distributed information retrieval, information extraction, automatic system self-maintenance, and customization on demand. The proposed technology empowers ordinary users in their search for more relevant and more up-to-date news items from a large number of news sources. It also empowers them to customize the search system to suit their information needs.