Metasearch engines are Web services designed to transfer the user queries to multiple existing search engines (called component engines). A metasearch engine does not maintain its own index of documents. It collects and reorganizes the result lists (top-k lists), then it returns the processed data to the user.

Compared to a standard single search engine, a metasearch engine offers:

• Increased web coverage
• Improved retrieval effectiveness
• Effortless invocation of multiple search engines

QuadSearch is a constantly evolving metasearch engine designed to serve as a testbed for evaluating and developing rank aggregation, data fusion and result clustering methods. It is hosted by the Raptor Web server, which belongs to the Data Engineering Laboratory (DELAB), of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

It has been created by Leonidas Akritidis, George Voutsakelis, Dimitrios Katsaros and Panayiotis Bozanis.

Their main purpose is to build a powerful scientific tool, that will be used by the academic community in order to retrieve useful information. Their secondary objective focuses on finding better and faster rank aggregation and data fusion methods.

QuadSearch's heart is the KE Algorithm, which is the mechanism that determines the classification of the collected results. KE Algorithm was invented by the founders of this engine and has also been the basis for Search Engine Analyzer. Apart from KE Algorithm, QuadSearch is capable of using a variety of several other ranking algorithms to organize the collected results. You can select among many rank aggregation methods by visiting the Options page.

QuadSearch is constantly under construction. If you have any suggestions for it, or you want to report a security issue, please let us know, by filling the appropriate contact form.