Sailing the web with captain Nemo: a personalized metasearch engine

Personalization on the Web is an issue that has gained a lot of interest lately. Web sites have already started providing services such as preferences for the interface, the layout and the functionality of the applications. Personalization services have also been introduced in Web search and metasearch engines, i.e. tools that retrieve Web pages relevant to keywords given by the users. However, those services deal mostly with the presentation style and ignore issues like the retrieval model, the ranking algorithm and topic pref- erences. In this paper, we present Captain Nemo, a fully-functionable metasearch engine that exploits personal user search spaces. Users can define their personal retrieval model and presentation style. They can also define topics of interest. Captain Nemo exploits several popular Web search engines to retrieve Web pages relevant to keywords given by the users. The resulting pages are presented according to the defined presentation style and retrieval model. For every page, Captain Nemo can recommend a relevant topic of interest to classify the page, exploiting nearest neighbour classification techniques.