Mining web interactions to automatically create mashups

Abstract

The deep web contains an order of magnitude more information than the surface web, but that information is hidden behind the web forms of a large number of web sites. Metasearch engines can help users explore this information by aggregating results from multiple resources, but previously these could only be created and maintained by programmers. In this paper, we explore the automatic creation of metasearch mash-ups by mining the web interactions of multiple web users to find relations between query forms on different web sites. We also present an implemented system called TX2 that uses those connections to search multiple deep web resources simultaneously and integrate the results in context in a single results page. TX2 illustrates the promise of constructing mash-ups automatically and the potential of mining web interactions to explore deep web resources. Copyright 2009 ACM.