U-search: a meta engine for creation of knowledge paths on the web

Abstract

The main tools used to find digital contents in the Web are search engines and directories but they are not presently able to understand the user specific needs and starting knowledge. This work presents "U-Search" a new meta engine that allows to create knowledge paths on the Web based on specific user requirements and knowledge levels. To this end, we consider different searcher categories such as a "basic searcher" who knows little about a topic and will look for more information, a "deep searcher" who will look for specific details on a topic that he/she already knows and a "wide searcher" who will look for expanding his/her knowledge domain with topics that are loosely related to the starting topic. The meta engine will suggest words and web pages correlated to each of those searcher categories thus creating new knowledge paths tailored to the real user needs.