This report addresses the problem of providing integrated access to robot-gathered and human-catalogued searchable resources on the Internet. For example, a subject-based Internet catalogue that describes Business and Economics resources might be usefully cross-searched against a much larger (but lower quality) resources containing several thousand pages from Web sites in that subject area. There are several ways in which these complementary services might be presented in an integrated fashion to users. This paper presents an overview of the major issues, describes a variety of practical approaches suitable for immediate deployment and highlights areas for future software-development, standards and user-interface work. This paper will focus on the development of the European Web Index in this context.

Several scenarios are explored, with particular focus on cross-searching infrastructure, user interface issues and varying approaches to multi-protocol distributed searching. Examples are presented which draw upon existing robot and subject gateway resources, searchable using the Z39.50 protocol.