A Scalable Distributed Client Based Meta Search and Discovery Infrastructure

Web searching has become a ubiquitous and indispensable activity for a wide spectrum of human endeavors. The success of search engines, such as Google, and meta-search engines, such as Science.gov has been built, to a large extent and on an unprecedented scale, upon costly hardware, software, and network infrastructures. Many desirable meta-search and discovery applications ¿ e.g., providing access to high quality educational content in government scientific and technological databases for tens of millions of students in the U.S. and worldwide (as part of the DOE/OSTI Science Accelerator project) ¿ would require expensive server and network resources, if conventional solutions were used. This project will develop a novel and highly scalable distributed infrastructure to support the specialized meta-searching of large numbers of heterogeneous information sources by a very large numbers of individual users. Phase I will involve the development of prototype software, which will be tested on DOE/OSTI databases in Phase II . Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardee The innovative browser-based meta-search software would allow tens of millions of users (e.g., students) to access diverse DOE and other government science and technology information sources, without requiring costly infrastructure and bandwidth investments