Discovering the representative of a search engine

Given a large number of search engines on the Internet, it is difficult for a person to determine which search engines could serve his/her information needs. A common solution is to construct a metasearch engine on top of the search engines. Upon receiving a user query, the metasearch engine sends it to those underlying search engines which are likely to return the desired documents for the query. The selection algorithm used by a metasearch engine to determine whether a search engine should be sent the query typically makes the decision based on the search-engine representative, which contains characteristic information about the database of a search engine. However, an underlying search engine may not be willing to provide the needed information to the metasearch engine. This paper shows that the needed information can be estimated from an uncooperative search engine with good accuracy. Two pieces of information which permit accurate search engine selection are the number of documents indexed by the search engine and the maximum weight of each term. In this paper, we present techniques for the estimation of these two pieces of information.