AgrOn: Aggregating search results

If restaurants compete over the quality of food and the way of combining and serving it, there is an analogous competition among Information Retrieval Systems (IRS) for feeding information. Only a carefully combined and adequately served dish will be digested and enjoyed by the user. The ranked lists returned by search engines have become long menus, which often contain hidden ingredients (information) the user has to scan. The user has to search within several documents to assemble all the information needed. This approach risks overfeeding the user, which might lose his apetite as well as his time and focus.

Nevertheless, information retrieval systems have evolved a lot recently. The expansion of the Web and its use has propulsed and propagated the power of search engines. Traditional web search has been asided by different vertical searches which allow to focus search within a specific domain. Vertical searches are advancing paralelly with web search.

Today, there is a trend in main search engines to integrate vertical search results within web results, but also geographical search exploits image search as person seach can exploit georgraphical search. IR is in a crucial point where advances from different areas can be met and integrated to enhance the user search experience.