Combining Information from Multiple Internet Sources

5. Final remarks
In this thesis application of the three approaches (Game theory, Auction and Consensus
based one) for combining information was presented. These methods were implemented and tested,
thus providing insight on the main aim of the thesis: to find out if those approaches could be applied
to the combining information problem, to check if those methods are able to improve the quality of
retrieved information by consolidating results of search engines into one result set.
The main benefit of those approaches is that they filter the result sets in some extent,
providing better out of box results, than ordinary search engines. The results provided by those
methods were compared to each of the search engine that contributed to the methods answer. It
turned out that result sets created by through combination of URLs provided by search engines
provided better insight on the query. For simple query results were extraordinary – the information
provided by every algorithm was highly relevant. For complex queries, Consensus and Game theory
based methods provided better results than those provided by Auction. In general, Auction method,
provided worst (this is a subjective opinion) results of all methods, but still when dealing with
simple queries, quality of those was comparable with other methods.
Those methods are ranking based methods – they do not take into account the content of the
resources. Still those were compared with content based approach of information combining which
is MySpiders system. It turned out, that the tested methods provided very similar results to those
provided by the MySpiders. However, the MySpiders system provided results only for the two
simpler queries. The last query has proven, to be too much for the MySpiders to handle.
Nevertheless, when comparing MySpiders to the methods, after issuing simpler queries, results were
very similar, thus proving that the content based approaches may not necessarily be better than the
purely rank based ones.
As a possible future work, one could introduce rankings of the search engines, based on
previous results of the methods. Rankings of those engines were implemented in very simple
manner, but those were not tested (and not used during testing of the methods) as it was not the
main aim of the thesis. However, introducing engines’ ranks would allow for further filtering of the
answers, by giving handicap to the engines which contributed in smaller extent to the final results of
the methods.
Another possibility is to extend of the tool that was used to testing by adding some new
methods for combining information. The tool was written in multi-agent environment, so is easily
extensible and it could be used for testing another, more even more complex algorithms for
combining information from multiple Internet sources.
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