Discovery of Similarity Computations of Search Engines

Two typical situations in which it is of practical interest to determine the similarities of text documents to a query due to a search engine are: (1) a global search engine, constructed on top of a group of local search engines, wishes to retrieve the set of local documents globally most similar to a given query; and (2) an organization wants to compare the retrieval performance of search engines. The dot-product function is a widely used similarity function. For a search engine using such a function, we can determine its similarity computations if how the search engine sets the weights of terms is known, which is usually not the case. In this paper, techniques are presented to discover certain mathematical expressions of these formulas and the values of embedded constants when the dot-product similarly function is used. Preliminary results from experiments on the WebCrawler search engine are given to illustrate our techniques.