A Topology-driven Approach to the Design of Web Meta-Search Clustering Engines

The paradigm adopted by classical Web search engines to output the results of a query is often inadequate. It typically consists of a ranked list of URLs, which may be very long and difficult to browse for the interested user. Recently, a lot of attention has been devoted to the design of Web meta-search clustering engines. These systems support the user by grouping the URLs returned by a search engine into distinct semantic categories, which are organized in a hierarchy; each category is properly labeled with a sentence that reflects its topics. However, even the most effective Web meta-search engines usually end-up by presenting many ``meaningful'' categories together with a few ``inexpressive'' categories on some specific queries. In this paper we describe a novel topology-driven approach to the design of a Web meta-search clustering engine. By this approach the set of URLs is modeled as a suitable graph and the hierarchy of categories is obtained by variants of classical graph-clustering algorithms. The topology-driven approach turns out to be comparable with traditional text-based strategies for the definition of the cluster hierarchy. In addition, our approach makes it natural to use graph visualization techniques to support the user in handling inexpressive labels. Namely, categories with inexpressive labels can be visually related to more meaningful ones.