Abstract
In this paper, we present a statistical method to estimate the usefulness of a search engine for any given query. The estimates can be used by a metasearch engine to choose local search engines to invoke. For a given query, the usefulness of a search engine in this paper is defined to be a combination of the number of documents in the search engine that are sufficiently similar to the query and the average similarity of these documents. Experimental results indicate that the proposed estimation method is quite accurate.