Mearf
Mearf was an experimental expert and content agreement based meta search engine developed by Uygar Oztekin. It forwarded a given query to a number of search engines, collected URLs and snippets, and used novel duplicate removal and reranking/merging methods to present the results back to the user. Mearf was accessible from a search box in Computer Science and Engineering home page and from its own URL: http://mearf.cs.umn.edu for several years (starting from 2000). It had a reasonable, international user base. Retired in 2004. Usage logs were essential in evaluating and improving various algorithms used in Mearf. I am grateful to all of our users.
- Technical report describing the architecture and various ranking methods .
- Technical report comparing ranking comparison metrics used in Mearf.
- WWW 2002 paper.
- A subset of stats computed using several months worth of logs.
Scout
Scout was built on top of Mearf infrastructure and had clustering, indexing, relevance feedback, and profile based reranking. It probably was one of the earliest attempts of personalizing search results incorporating novel clustering and presentation schemes as well as group level and individual level personalization. It was online at scout.cs.umn.edu for a few years around 2000.
- Technical report.
- Paper presented at IAWTIC 2000.
- An intranet version of scout (iscout.cs.umn.edu) was also available.
USearch
USearch is an intranet / site specific search engine developed by Uygar Oztekin in 2002. It incorporated all essential components of a small scale search engine from crawling, to link/log analysis, to serving queries with production quality infrastructure. It served cs.umn.edu site searches for several years and it is retired in 2004. One of the algorithms used was Usage Aware PageRank, a variant of PageRank incorporating usage statistics developed by Oztekin et al.