Using Past Queries for Resource Selection in Distributed Information Retrieval

Federated text search provides a unified search interface for multiple search engines of distributed text information sources. Resource selection is an important component for federated text search, which selects a small number of information sources that contain the largest number of relevant documents for a user query. Most prior research of resource selection focused on selecting information sources by analyzing static information of available information source that is sampled in the offline manner. On the other hand, most prior research ignored a large amount of valuable information like the results from past queries.