Most information retrieval techniques have been developed for English and other Western languages. As the second largest Internet language, Chinese provides a good setting for study of how search engine techniques developed for English could be generalized for use in other languages to facilitate Internet searching and browsing in a multilingual world. This paper reviews different techniques used in search engines and proposes an integrated approach to development of a Chinese medical portal: CMedPort. The techniques integrated into CMedPort include meta-search engines, cross-regional search, summarization and categorization. A user study was conducted to compare the effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction of CMedPort and three major Chinese search engines. Preliminary results from the user study show that CMedPort achieves similar accuracy in searching tasks, and higher effectiveness and efficiency in browsing tasks than Openfind, a Taiwan search engine portal. We believe that the proposed approach can be used to support Chinese information seeking in Web-based digital library applications.
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