A Service-Based Architecture for Multi-domain Search on the Web

Current search engines lack in support for multi-domain queries, i.e., queries that can be answered by combining information from two or more knowledge domains. Questions such as "Find a theater close to Times Square, NYC, showing a recent thriller movie, close to a pizza restaurant" have no answer unless the user individually queries different vertical search engines for each domain and then manually combines results. Therefore, the need arises for a special class of search applications that combine different search services. in this paper we propose an architecture aiming at answering multi-domain queries through composition of search services and we provide facilities for the execution of multidomain queries and the visualization of their results, at the purpose of simplifying the access to the information. We describe our service-based architecture and the implemented optimization and distribution options, and we evaluate the feasibility and performance of our approach.