A Fuzzy Ordered Weighted Average (OWA) Approach to Result Merging for Metasearch Using the Analytical Network Process

A metasearch engine is a Information Retrieval (IR) tool that greatly expands the scope of Internet Search. Functionally a metasearch engine passes a query to multiple search engines and combines and re-ranks results returned by them in one merged list. Result Merging is a key component of metasearch and different techniques have been applied to solve the problem. In this paper we propose a model for result merging based on Saty's Analytical Network Process (ANP) and Yager's Ordered Weighted Average operator. We compare our results with four existing models for result merging, namely the Borda-Fuse, Weighted Borda-Fuse, Condorcet Fuse and the OWA model.