SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR INTEGRATING SEARCH RESULTS FROM HETEROGENEOUS INFORMATION RESOURCES

A system and method for relative ranking and contextual summarization of search hits from multiple distributed, heterogeneous information resources based upon the original content of each hit is disclosed. In particular, the system and method of the present invention improve upon metasearch engine techniques by downloading the original documents (text or multimedia) identified by standard search engines as relevant and using the original content of each "hit" to re-rank them relative to each other according to the original query pattern for the search, providing a uniform ranking methodology for the user. The present invention is also directed to an improved summarization process where the downloaded documents are re-summarized relative to each other according to the original query pattern for the search, providing a uniform summarization methodology for the user.