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MARVIN :
Introduction
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With the number of World Wide Web sites growing
every day, the problem is not just to find information, but to locate
the right piece of information. Current solutions for structuring
information, subject hierarchies and general search engines have
both advantages and drawbacks. Subject hierarchies are precise enough
due to manual classification. However, the number of results provided
in response to an average query is usually low due to the small
amount of documents indexed. General World Wide Web search engines,
indexing most of the Web, return a long list of documents, but often
to the detriment of precision. The search result is then barely
usable because of the large number of answers from different domains
and topics. Only complex queries may, in a given situation, produce
a limited number of potentially relevant documents. To make searches
more efficient and useful to ordinary users, we need intelligent
and specialised search engines on the Net.
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The primary objective of MARVIN project
(Multi-Agent Retrieval Vagabond on Information
Networks), started in January 1996, was to reduce the search
space by considering and indexing only a given field by filtering
Web pages and to support the multilinguality of the Web. MARVIN,
HON's own Web-spider, was first applied to the medical
domain. Armed with a dictionary of medical terms, MARVIN
tirelessly skims the Web for new sources of medical information.
MARVIN feeds and constantly updates MedHunt, HON's
medical and health search engine. The 16th November 2000, 2'000
visits (different computer) and 8'000 accesses to MedHunt show the
effectiveness and utility of this complementary set MARVIN - MedHunt.
MARVIN and MedHunt have been developed and are the property of
HON.
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