Senior Project - Argo

When users of the World Wide Web perform a typical web search, they are usually looking for a particular piece of information. Current generation search engines respond to these queries with a list of URLs (Universal Resource Locators) that link to web pages thought to contain the information searched for. If a search engine's relevance ranking method is effective, a web page returned in response to a search will usually contain information relevant to the query somewhere in a given page. Given that the length of web pages can be substantial, a more precise indicator of where in the web page the desired information is located would be quite useful. The goal of this project is to apply novel algorithms to develop a meta search engine that begins to address this need.

The system provides a search engine that interfaces very similarly to current search engines. The user enters search criteria, usually a few key words, and gets results just like they do with current search engines. The differences between a current search engine and this software begin when the user clicks on a result link. The user is taken to a page that looks like the page located by the search engine, but one that has all information relevant to the specific search highlighted. The system also provides links that allow the user to quickly navigate to all relevant sections of the page.