Metasearch can effectively search distributed immense electronic resources. It is built on top of severalsearch engines, providing user with uniform access to these engines. Metasearch first passes user's query to underly-ing useful search engines, and then collects and reorganizes the results from the search engines used. It is calledsearch engines selection when metasearch selects underlying useful search engines. In this paper, we present a statis-tical method based on relevance terms to estimate the usefulness of a search engine for any given query, which is suit-able for both Boolean query and vector query. Experimental results indicate that the proposed estimation method isquite accurate, especially when the critical similarity is high between the query and the results.
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