Learning to Compete in Heterogeneous Web Search Environments

Abstract

Introduction Previous research in Web search has mainly targeted performance of search engines from the user's point of view. Parameters such as precision, recall, and freshness of returned results were optimised. On the other hand, a provider of search services is rather interested in parameters like the number of queries processed versus the amount of resources used to process them. We focus on performance optimisation of search engines from the service provider's point of view. An important factor that affects the search engine performance is competition with other independently controlled search engines. When there are many engines available, users want to send queries to those that provide the best possible results. Thus, the service offered by one search engine influences queries received by others. Competition is even more important in heterogeneous search environments consisting of many specialised search engines (which provide access to the so-called "deep" or "invisible "