Meta-search Engine Research Articles

Meta Search Engine with Semantic Analysis and Query Processing

Meta Search Engine with Semantic Analysis and Query Processing

Quality of Online Resources for Pancreatic Cancer Patients.

The Internet is increasingly a source of information for pancreatic cancer patients. This disease is usually diagnosed at an advanced stage; therefore, timely access to high-quality information is critical. Our purpose is to systematically evaluate the information available to pancreatic cancer patients on the internet. An internet search using the term "pancreatic cancer" was performed, with the meta-search engines "Dogpile", "Yippy" and "Google". The top 100 websites returned by the search engines were evaluated using a validated structured rating tool. Inter-rater reliability was evaluated using kappa statistics and results were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Amongst the 100 websites evaluated, etiology/risk factors and symptoms were the most accurately covered (70 and 67% of websites). Prevention, treatment and prognosis were the least accurate sections (55, 55 and 43% of websites). Prevention and prognosis were also the least likely to be covered with 63 and 51 websites covering these, respectively. Only 40% of websites identified an author. Twenty-two percent of websites were at a university reading level. The majority of online information is accurate but incomplete. Websites may lack information on prognosis. Many websites are outdated and lacked author information, and readability levels are inappropriate. This knowledge can inform the dialogue between healthcare providers and patients.

Conceptualización de la interacción comunicativa y su caracterización

Este artículo tiene como objetivo definir la interacción comunicativa y cada uno de los elementos que permiten su caracterización. Para esto, se realizó una revisión de la literatura mediante una búsqueda inicial en libros, metabuscadores y diferentes bases de datos, seleccionando la información pertinente según distintas corrientes para la construcción del concepto integrador de la interacción comunicativa y para la descripción de los elementos que permiten su caracterización en dos grandes categorías: las habilidades pragmáticas y las habilidades sociales, teniendo en cuenta las modalidades verbal oral y no verbal desde la perspectiva del modelo sistémico de la comunicación. Se concluye resaltando la importancia que adquieren la interacción comunicativa y sus elementos para el estudio de la comunicación humana, siendo una herramienta útil para que el profesional en fonoaudiología ahonde en su objeto de estudio, actualice sus conocimientos y traslade esta caracterización a los diferentes escenarios en que se desempeña.

Rank aggregation: New bounds for MCx

The rank aggregation problem has received significant recent attention within the computer science community. Its applications today range far beyond the original aim of building metasearch engines to problems in machine learning, recommendation systems and more. Several algorithms have been proposed for these problems, and in many cases approximation guarantees have been proven for them. However, it is also known that some Markov chain based algorithms (MC1, MC2, MC3, MC4) perform extremely well in practice, yet had no known performance guarantees. We prove supra-constant lower bounds on approximation guarantees for all of them. Nevertheless, we show that in particular ways, MC4 can be seen as a generalization of Copeland score.

Document Clustering Approach for Meta Search Engine

The size of WWW is growing exponentially with ever change in technology. This results in huge amount of information with long list of URLs. Manually it is not possible to visit each page individually. So, if the page ranking algorithms are used properly then user search space can be restricted up to some pages of searched results. But available literatures show that no single search system can provide qualitative results from all the domains. This paper provides solution to this problem by introducing a new meta search engine that determine the relevancy of query corresponding to web page and cluster the results accordingly. The proposed approach reduces the user efforts, improves the quality of results and performance of the meta search engine.

Rank aggregation using ant colony approach for metasearch

Metasearch engines provide a plethora of information to the user through World Wide Web. They are the prominent sources of query-based search and centralized human–world interactions. Metasearch engine shows a list of Web sites to a particular query as per the rank assigned to a web link. The effectiveness of metasearch engine is also examined on the basis of ranks assigned to Web sites for a particular query. Assigning top rank to a web link with most relevant information pertaining to a query by the search engine is formulated as research problem. Here, we have formulated the rank aggregation optimization problem by using metaheuristic approach. Search engines are facing widely two problems such as biasing of search solutions and giving irrelevant rank to similar kind of documents. Both these problems can be overcome by applying an effective rank aggregation technique for combining the search results from various search engines. This paper presents a metaheuristic approach to optimize Spearman’s footrule and Kendall-tau distance measures which are used to compare ranking methods. The performance of proposed ant colony-based strategy is compared with GA technique and is validated through experimental results for real-world queries. Likewise, Precision, Recall and F-Measure-based performance metrics are employed to test the effectiveness of various metasearch engines.

Factores que influyen en la adherencia al tratamiento del paciente en diálisis peritoneal

Introducción: Actualmente, los profesionales de enfermería al implementar los cuidados para el paciente con enfermedad renal crónica mediante diálisis peritoneal, encuentran como principal dificultad la poca adherencia del mismo en las áreas correspondientes al dominio en la técnica, control de factores nutricionales, control hídrico y manejo farmacológico entre otros; los cuales conllevan un impacto negativo en la permanencia en la terapia así como en la supervivencia. Objetivo: Explorar los factores que influyen en la adherencia de los pacientes adultos a la terapia dialítica peritoneal y las consecuencias de la falta de ésta reportadas en la literatura. Material y Método: La búsqueda electrónica se realizó utilizando las bases de datos PUBMED, meta buscadores como google académico, Epistemonikos, Scielo, entre otros. Se consideraron estudios primarios realizados en pacientes adultos de 18 a 80 años, entre los años 2008-2015, en idioma inglés y español. Resultado: Los pacientes en DP presentan problemas de falta de adherencia en mayor proporción en los parámetros nutricionales, restricción de fluidos seguida del manejo correcto de la técnica y pautas farmacológicas indicadas por el profesional de la salud. Conclusión: La adherencia al tratamiento del paciente en diálisis peritoneal debe ser explorada por enfermería por su diversa complejidad mediante estudios fenomenológicos.

Evaluation of Search Engine Weight by Considering Repeated Web Page Contents

AbstractThe ranking of search results largely determines the quality of service (QoS) of a meta-search engine (MSE). To address the demand of big data applications, this paper proposes a new method...

Uncovering Web search strategies in South African higher education

Background: In spite of the enormous amount of information available on the Web and the fact that search engines are continuously evolving to enhance the search experience, students are nevertheless faced with the difficulty of effectively retrieving information. It is, therefore, imperative for the interaction between students and search tools to be understood and search strategies to be identified, in order to promote successful information retrieval.Objectives: This study identifies the Web search strategies used by postgraduate students and forms part of a wider study into information retrieval strategies used by postgraduate students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), Pietermaritzburg campus, South Africa. Method: Largely underpinned by Thatcher’s cognitive search strategies, the mixed-methods approach was utilised for this study, in which questionnaires were employed in Phase 1 and structured interviews in Phase 2. This article reports and reflects on the findings of Phase 2, which focus on identifying the Web search strategies employed by postgraduate students. The Phase 1 results were reported in Civilcharran, Hughes and Maharaj (2015).Results: Findings reveal the Web search strategies used for academic information retrieval. In spite of easy access to the invisible Web and the advent of meta-search engines, the use of Web search engines still remains the preferred search tool. The UKZN online library databases and especially the UKZN online library, Online Public Access Catalogue system, are being underutilised.Conclusion: Being ranked in the top three percent of the world’s universities, UKZN is investing in search tools that are not being used to their full potential. This evidence suggests an urgent need for students to be trained in Web searching and to have a greater exposure to a variety of search tools. This article is intended to further contribute to the design of undergraduate training programmes in order to deal with the information retrieval frustrations of novice users.

Custom Fusion Methode Based on Borda

<p class="Abstract"><span lang="EN-US">Searching for information on the Internet is not only an activity newly rediscovered, but also a strategic tool to achieve a wide variety of information. Indeed, it’s extremely important to know how to find the information quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, the Web is so huge and so little structured, that gathering precise, fair and useful information becomes an expensive task. In order to define an information retrieval tool (meta search engine) that brings together multiple sources of information search, interest must be credited to the merger phase of search engines results. On the other hand, information search systems tend primarily to model the user with a profile and then to integrate it into the information access chain, to better meet its specific needs. </span></p><p class="Abstract"><span lang="EN-US">This paper presents a custom fusion method based on Borda method and values retrieved from the user profile. We evaluated our approach on multiple domains and we present some experimental results.</span></p>

Artificial neural network-based merging score for Meta search engine

Several users use metasearch engines directly or indirectly to access and gather data from more than one data sources. The effectiveness of a metasearch engine is majorly determined by the quality of the results and it returns and in response to user queries. The rank aggregation methods which have been proposed until now exploits very limited set of parameters such as total number of used resources and the rankings they achieved from each individual resource. In this work, we use the neural network to merge the score computation module effectively. Initially, we give a query to different search engines and the top n list from each search engine is chosen for further processing our technique. We then merge the top n list based on unique links and we do some parameter calculations such as title based calculation, snippet based calculation, content based calculation, domain calculation, position calculation and co-occurrence calculation. We give the solutions of the calculations with user given ranking of links to the neural network to train the system. The system then rank and merge the links we obtain from different search engines for the query we give. Experimentation results reports a retrieval effectiveness of about 80%, precision of about 79% for user queries and about 72% for benchmark queries. The proposed technique also includes a response time of about 76 ms for 50 links and 144 ms for 100 links.

Recognition and Description of Unknown Everyday Objects by Using an Image Based Meta-Search Engine for Service Robots

In future applications service robots will operate in complex and unstructured environments. While performing daily tasks such systems will have to recognize many different unknown objects in order to be able to conduct continuative processes. To support enhanced functionalities of a service robot system an image based meta-search engine that is accessible for a machine can be used. In this contribution the realization of an approach to determine reasonable identification results for single and multiple everyday objects by using the Google reverse image search system is described. In order to deliver convenient results for the communication of a robotic system with a human user the generated search results are post-processed and prepared in order to provide reasonable object descriptions. To enable an intuitive application, control a gesture based approach allows potential users to initialize a search procedure by pointing at an object of interest while being observed by a camera system. The performed experiments show a quite reliable detection behavior for a reasonably broad variety of everyday objects.

Lifestyles Based on Health Components in Iran

Context: Lifestyle is a way employed by people, groups and nations and is formed in specific geographical, economic, political, cultural and religious texts. Health depends on lifestyle and is essential to preserve and promote health and improve lifestyle. Objectives: The present study aimed to investigate lifestyle based on health-oriented components in Iran. Data Sources: The research was conducted through E-banks including scientific information database (SID), Iran medical science databank (Iran Medex), Iran journal databank (Magiran) and other databases such as Elsevier, PubMed and google scholar meta search engine regarding the subject from 2000 to 2014. Moreover, Official Iranian statistics and information were applied. The search terms used included lifestyle, health, health promoting behaviors, health-oriented lifestyle and lifestyle in Iran. Study Selection: In the primary research, many papers were observed out of which 157 (120 in Farsi and 37 in English) were selected. Data Extraction: Following the careful study of these papers and excluding the unqualified papers, 19 papers with thorough information and higher relevance with the research purpose were selected. Results: After examining articles based on the selected keywords and search strategies, 215 articles (134 in Farsi and 81 in English) were obtained. Components of lifestyle and health are increasing in recent years; therefore, 8 (42%) and 11 (58%) articles were published during 2005 - 2010 and 2011 - 2014, respectively. Among them, there were 3 (16%), 8 (42%), 2 (10.5%), 2 (10.5%) and 0 articles on the review of literature, descriptive-analytic, qualitative, analytic and descriptive articles, respectively. Conclusions: Due to positive effect of healthy lifestyle on health promotion of individuals, it would be better for the government to provide comprehensive programs and policies in the society to enhance awareness of people about positive effects of healthoriented lifestyle on life and also provide required conditions to have a healthy lifestyle. Islamic Republic of Iran considers all aspects of health. Therefore, by paying attention to physical, psychological, social and spiritual health and wisdom, it can provide social and individual healthy lifestyles. Keywords: Lifestyle, Health, Health Promoting

Assessing asthma severity based on claims data: a systematic review

IntroductionAsthma is one of the most common chronic diseases in Germany. Substantial economic evaluation of asthma cost requires knowledge of asthma severity, which is in general not part of claims data. Algorithms need to be defined to use this data source.Aims and objectivesThe aim of this study was to systematically review the international literature to identify algorithms for the stratification of asthma patients according to disease severity based on available information in claims data.MethodsA systematic literature review was conducted in September 2015 using the DIMDI SmartSearch, a meta search engine including several databases with a national and international scope, e.g. BIOSIS, MEDLINE, and EMBASE. Claims data based studies that categorize asthma patients according to their disease severity were identified.ResultsThe systematic research yielded 54 publications assessing asthma severity based on claims data. Thirty-nine studies used a standardized algorithm such as HEDIS, Leidy, the GINA based approach or CACQ. Sixteen publications applied a variety of different criteria for the severity categorisation such as asthma diagnoses, asthma-related drug prescriptions, emergency department visits, and hospitalisations.ConclusionThere is no best practice method for the categorisation of asthma severity with claims data. Rather, a combination of algorithms seems to be a pragmatic approach. A transfer to the German context is not entirely possible without considering particular conditions associated with German claims data.

Comparative analysis of Rank Aggregation techniques for metasearch using genetic algorithm

Rank Aggregation techniques have found wide applications for metasearch along with other streams such as Sports, Voting System, Stock Markets, and Reduction in Spam. This paper presents the optimization of rank lists for web queries put by the user on different MetaSearch engines. A metaheuristic approach such as Genetic algorithm based rank aggregation technique has been proposed and implemented in MATLAB for Kendall-tau as (GKTu) and Spearman's foot rule as (GSFD) distance measures. A comparative analysis has been carried out between ranked lists for with and without GA on the basis of simulated results. From the results it has been found that proposed GA optimized rank list (for a particular query on the basis of minimum distance) is better than the conventional methods. In addition, a word association technique i.e., AND-OR operator has been applied on each query. The results are investigated in comparison to non- logic operators for the same query.

EFFECTIVE WRITING OF STUDENTS OF TECHNICAL SPECIALTIES

The paper deals with the problem of teaching writing the students of technical specialties in the conditions of interdisciplinarity. The achievements in the field of teaching writing are given. The effective ways of writing texts by the students of higher technical educational institutions are considered. To achieve successful and effective written communication it is necessary to pay attention to the audience; the purpose of writing; researching the topic; focusing the ideas; information organization and content. The audience backgrounds, interests, the level of education and familiarity with the subject have to be taken into consideration by authors. For defining the purposes of the texts it is necessary to follow the scheme "style → genre → sub-purposes". Researching the topic means collecting information from different sources and processing it. Gathering information is realized on the base of the interdisciplinary approach. The Internet is considered to be the dynamic environment that suggests various information for writing. There are different ways of searching information on the Internet: the search by topics; the keyword search (with the help of search engines or a metasearch engine); the search by links. For focusing the ideas it is possible to use different tools such as brainstorming, freewriting and mindmap. Information organization of the text is considered as the structural foundation of writing that guides readers through the text and helps them to understand the progression of author's thoughts. It focuses on the structure of the text and using connective elements.

The role and impact of comparison websites on the consumer search process in the US and German airline markets

The paper examines how consumers search for airline tickets based on a comparative analysis of the US and German markets. Data from comScore is analysed using an innovative application of set theory. ComScore is a leading commercial provider of business intelligence and consumer analytics based on its worldwide panel of two million online users. The search process is modelled using the concept of the consideration set based on primary search with the airline websites and secondly by the use of online travel agents and meta-search engines, which are termed comparison websites. Three generic search models are proposed: (1) primary search with airline websites only; (2) search of comparison websites only; (3) a combination of primary search and comparison websites. Each generic search model accounts for a significant proportion of overall users in both markets. The consideration sets are 2.58 in Germany and 2.74 in the United States. It is shown that the use of comparison websites significantly increases the propensity to conduct additional primary search based on analysis of all major airline pairs in both markets. The theoretical and managerial implications of the results are described and future research opportunities are outlined.

A repülőjegyárak változásának időbeli alakulása, budapesti indulással

A repülőjegyárak változásának időbeli alakulása, budapesti indulással

A Chinese Topic Crawler Focused on Customer Development

This paper presents a Chinese topic crawler focused on customer development, in order to meet the needs of users for more accurate and particular Internet information. The concept of meta-search engine is introduced, and the keywords are expanded by the ontology of HowNet. Through the web crawler, preprocessing and classification, the information on customer relations can be divided into three categories: company, platform and meaningless. Numerical experiments show that satisfactory results can be obtained in some particular information-seeking areas. The average accuracy for classification is more than 80%, which can meet customer needs in most cases.

Preference relations based unsupervised rank aggregation for metasearch

Rank aggregation mechanisms have been used in solving problems from various domains such as bioinformatics, natural language processing, information retrieval, etc. Metasearch is one such application where a user gives a query to the metasearch engine, and the metasearch engine forwards the query to multiple individual search engines. Results or rankings returned by these individual search engines are combined using rank aggregation algorithms to produce the final result to be displayed to the user. We identify few aspects that should be kept in mind for designing any rank aggregation algorithm for metasearch. For example, generally equal importance is given to the input rankings while performing the aggregation. However, depending on the indexed set of web pages, features considered for ranking, ranking functions used etc. by the individual search engines, the individual rankings may be of different qualities. So, the aggregation algorithm should give more weight to the better rankings while giving less weight to others. Also, since the aggregation is performed when the user is waiting for response, the operations performed in the algorithm need to be light weight. Moreover, getting supervised data for rank aggregation problem is often difficult. In this paper, we present an unsupervised rank aggregation algorithm that is suitable for metasearch and addresses the aspects mentioned above.We also perform detailed experimental evaluation of the proposed algorithm on four different benchmark datasets having ground truth information. Apart from the unsupervised Kendall-Tau distance measure, several supervised evaluation measures are used for performance comparison. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm over baseline methods in terms of supervised evaluation metrics. Through these experiments we also show that Kendall-Tau distance metric may not be suitable for evaluating rank aggregation algorithms for metasearch.