Towards Integration Services for Heterogeneous Resources: An Integrated Search Engine forWeb Content and TV Programs

A search engine that can handle TV programs and Web content in an integrated way is proposed. Conventional search engines can target Web content and/or data stored in desktop PCs. However, in the future, the information to be searched is expected to be stored in various places such as in hard-disk recorders, digital cameras, mobile devices, and even in real space, and a search engine that can search across such heterogeneous resources will become essential. As a first step towards developing such a next-generation search engine, a prototype search system is proposed that can handle Web content as an information source with hyperlinks and TV programs as another without them, that performs integrated searches of those content, and that can subsequently search for content related to each search result. An integrated search is achieved by generating integrated indices based on keywords obtained from TV programs and Web content and by ranking them, and a chain search for related content is done by calculating the similarities of and ranking the content in the integrated indices. A zoom-based display of the results enables information to be acquired efficiently. Testing a prototype of the system validated the approach of the proposed method.