Federated, Vertical and Distributed Search
Large-scale search portals often provide access to a large collection of underlying search engines. Our research develops new ways to partition massive indexes into specialized search engines; select which specialized search engines are the best match for an individual query; and merge results returned by different specialized search engines into a single, coherent set of results. It enables principled integration of diverse resources into a single, integrated portal; and improves the speed of large-scale search by an order of magnitude using modest computational resources.