Patent ID: 7599928

Claim:
An information retrieval method carried out by a meta search engine communicating with n underlying search engines S 1 through S n via n associated adapters, the method comprising the steps of: the meta search engine receiving a query q T from a user; the adapters transforming the query q T received by the meta search engine into queries q 1 through q n in the formats of the associated underlying search engines S 1 through S n and submitting the queries q 1 through q n to the underlying search engines S 1 through S n ; the underlying search engines S 1 through S n performing searches for the corresponding queries q 1 through q n to provide n corresponding result lists R 1 through R n , and returning the result lists R 1 through R n to the adapters, wherein each of the result lists R 1 through R n consists of a plurality of results, the adapters reformatting the result lists R 1 through R n as result lists R′ 1 through R′ n and returning the result lists R′ 1 through R′ n to the meta search engine, wherein each of the result lists R′ 1 through R′ n consists of a plurality of results; the meta search engine merging the result lists R′ 1 through R′ n to provide a result list R′ of ranked results; the meta search engine performing relevancy processing in a manner which does not employ user-specific information, using at least one hit matrix H having in one dimension Web pages p historically selected by a community of users operating within a specific domain of interest and in another dimension query strings q from the same community of users as selected the Web pages p, wherein the value H ij in each cell indicates the number of times a particular Web page p j has been previously selected by a user in response to a particular query string q i , to provide a second result list R″ of particular Web pages p j selected in response to a particular query string q i identical or related to the query q T , the corresponding cells for which have a value H ij that is non-zero; the meta search engine performing post-processing of the result list R′ in a manner which does not employ user-specific information, the post-processing including the steps of the meta search engine: merging the result lists R′ and R″ to provide a merged result list R; and providing the merged result list R to the user as a response to the query q T .