AIsearch

Searching with AIsearch. A search process with the AIsearch Web interface starts as usual: A query in the form of interesting search terms is entered within a dialog field. The query is sent to several search engines and—for a syntactic analysis—to a SmartSpell^® server. The query results, i. e., the HTML document snippets, are collected and analyzed with respect to the similarity of their contents. Based on this analysis, adequate categories are formed and labeled, and a tree of the categories, which shows related categories at a closer distance than unrelated categories, is drawn in the hyperbolic plane. The following figure shows a snapshot of the AIsearch Web interface for the query "tea flavour". Aside from the hyperbolic category tree, the returned document snippets can also be browsed in a list format. The list groups all snippets of the same category together, and, immediate access to each sublist is possible by simply clicking the leafs in the category tree.

Software Architecture and Deployment. The figure shows how the AIsearch components are deployed to machines. When a user enters the AIsearch URL in his browser, a Java Applet that contains the AIsearch user interface is delivered from the Web server, which in turn communicates with the load balancing module. All requests from the client, such as a request for spelling or a request for search, are coded in a proprietary protocol that contains several commands. Whenever a command reaches the load balancing module, one of the AIsearch engines is chosen to perform the associated task. All commands are processed asynchronously. All computationally expensive tasks are performed as threads, which allows us to run several commands simultaneously on a single AIsearch engine. Moreover, the threading model supports multiprocessor machines ideally, and, combined with a load balancing concept, assures a simple scalability of the architecture.