STARTS
Stanford Proposal for Internet Meta-Searching

Chen-Chuan Kevin Chang

Hector Garcia-Molina

Luis Gravano

Andreas Paepcke


Stanford University

Search Engines Incompatible

Metasearcher

Informal Standard for Search Engine Interoperability

Both search engine vendors and “users” participated:

STARTS Components

Source Metadata

@SMetaAttributes{
FieldsSupported{17}: [basic-1 author]
ModifiersSupported{19}: {basic-1 phonetics}
FieldModifierCombinations{39}: ([basic-1 author]
                                                     {basic-1 phonetics})
ScoreRange{7}:  0.0 1.0
source-languages{8}: en-US es
source-name{17}: Stanford DB Group
…}

Content Summaries

@SContentSummary{
NumDocs{3}: 892

Field{5}: title
Language{5}: en-US
TermDocFreq{11023}: “algorithm” 100 53
                                     “analysis” 50 23
...
}

Queries: Filter + Ranking

@SQuery{
FilterExpression{48}: ((author “Ullman”) and
                                    (title stem “databases”))
RankingExpression{61}: list((body-of-text “distributed”)
                                              (body-of-text “databases”))
DefaultLanguage{5}: en-US
AnswerFields{12}: title author
MinDocumentScore{3}: 0.5
MaxNumberDocuments{2}: 10
}

Query Results

@SQRDocument{
RawScore{4}: 0.82
linkage{47}: http://www-db.stanford.edu/~ullman/pub/dood.ps
title{68}: A Comparison Between Deductive and
              Object-Oriented Database Systems
author{18}: Jeffrey D. Ullman
TermStats{89}: (body-of-text “distributed”) 10 0.31 190
                         (body-of-text “databases”) 15 0.51 232
}

Simplifying Decisions

But...

STARTS Status