Multi-Threaded Offline Meta-Search Engine - Remora

Tim Lukins, Darren Johns,
James Attenborough & Pete Edwards

Remora is a meta-search engine which packages user search queries for despatch to three established Web search engines: Yahoo, Lycos and Excite. It offers users the chance to submit a variety of query types (via a simple Java applet) which are then entered into a queue maintained by the Remora server. Once a query has been submitted, users are free to point their browser at another site, or even disconnect their modem. This approach is particularly useful at times of heavy network traffic.

Query modes include:

• Simple keyword search;
• Query by example (based on similar WWW pages);
• Most frequent topics;
• User-profile based search.

Results obtained from the search engines are parsed (to remove HTML tags, and other unwanted material). Redundant URLs are then removed, and the results clustered into keyword groupings, prior to transmission by email or assembly into a results page.

Why Remora?

... any of a family (Echeneididae) of marine bony fishes that have the anterior dorsal fin modified into a suctorial disk on the head by means of which they cling especially to other fishes, using them as transport hosts but in addition, obtains food fragments dropped from the host.

Work in Progress/Future Extensions

Remora is presently being enhanced with a variety of additional features including: global, european & local search modes; more advanced user-profiling features.

Registered users can click here to visit REMORA. To enquire about registration, contact: pedwards@csd.abdn.ac.uk

Funding:

Internal Undergraduate Project, Internal MSc Projects.

Phone: +44 (0)1224 272270
Fax: +44 (0)1224 273422

pedwards@csd.abdn.ac.uk