Combining Information from Multiple Internet Sources

This part will present the summary of comparison tests. The conclusions which appeared
after each part of comparison will be summarized here.
Auction method is a method which is highly dependent on each separate single result sets of
search engines rather than the combined view of all search engines. The results presented here
show, that no matter if the URL is in many result sets of the search engines, it may not still be taken
as a part of the final result. Instead, a lot of URLs are returned, which appear in only one of the
result sets provided by search engines. Game theory method also has the tendencies to not to take
the whole combined view of the search engines into the final result. However, if an URL was at the
top most places of more than one result set provided by search engines, it probably will be
incorporated (with high probability) into the final result set provided by this method. It may not be
the average place of such URL, but still it probably will appear somewhere at the bottom of the list.
Consensus method in general returned the results which are the most common view of the search
engines. However in three tested cases all result sets which were returned were inconsistent
according to consensus theory. This happens probably due to the high position-wise URL dispersion
throughout the result sets. There are situations where an URL is, for instance, on the 1 st place in one
result set on the 6 th place in another result set and on the 3 rd . This results in Levenshtein distance to
be very large and thus resulting in result sets being dispersed. Nevertheless if one was not to take
the consistency into account, the Consensus method provided the results which are best overall.
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