Metasearch Engines for ecommerce

1
Metasearch Engines for e-commerce Clement Yu,
Department of Computer Science National Science
Foundation

• Problem Statement and Motivation
• Many companies sell the same type of products (
  eg computers) or services ( eg. life insurance)
  via the Web.
• Looking for the best product or service (eg
  lowest price and meeting specifications) requires
  excessive checking of many Web search engines.
• This imposes too much burden on a user.
• The aim is to allow a user seeking a product or
  a service to submit a single query and to receive
  the results ranked in descending order of
  desirability.

• Technical Approach
• Companies selling products or services via the
  Web have different user interfaces.
• Create an user interface that integrates the
  features of each individual user interface and
  organize them such that the integrated interface
  is easily understood.
• A user query submitted against the integrated
  interface is translated into subqueries against
  individual interfaces.
• It is possible to determine for each user query,
  which search engines should be invoked
• based on the previously processed queries

• Key Achievements and Future Goals
• Most steps in the construction of the integrated
  user interface have been automated.
• The same technique can be applied in other areas
  (e.g. construct generalized forms)
• For selling a car online multiple forms need to
  be filled in
• Create a generalized form applicable to multiple
  sellers.
• Preliminary results have also been obtained to
  determine the proper search engines to invoke for
  each given user query.
• Will produce metasearch engines for various
  products and services.