When John Bronson flies home to Maryland two to three times a year, he uses multiple Internet sites to search for the cheapest airfare.
“The hardest thing for me is when to buy,” said Bronson, a graduate student in computer science. “Prices change every month.”
With a new Web site search engine that graduate students in the School of Computing are developing, students such as Bronson might be able to save time and money finding the best price.
The site, www.deeppeep.org, focuses on eight sections, including auto, airfare, rental, jobs, biology and book searches that the Google search engine can’t always access.
“The site isn’t taking you inside the deep Web, but it allows you to peep and search for detailed information,” said Juliana Freire, a computer science professor at the U who organized the site.
Freire said the search engine will make it simpler for people trying to find cheap airfare or buying a new or used car.
When people try to search for cheap airfare, they are directed to common airfare sites such as www.kayak.com and www.travelocity.com, which require them to fill out forms with information including travel times, costs and flexible dates.
When DeepPeep is completely up and running, site users will visit the site, fill in information one time and receive multiple options for cheap airfare without re-entering information on the various sites.
“If you enter data in search, including the price, model and make for a car, we want the search engine to do that for you and bypass those other forms for the top five or 10 results,” said Ramesh Pinnamaneni, a graduate student in computer science.
Freire said she and four graduate students have been developing the site since 2006 when they received money from the U’s Funding Incentive Seed Grant Program to start initial work on new areas of research. They applied for and received a $336,000 grant in 2007 from the National Science Foundation for three years and a supplemental grant for $27,000. The group plans to increase the site to include music and movie searches but will need more time and funding to set it up in the next few years.
The group has already requested additional funding from the foundation and the National Institutes of Health, which already rejected a request. Freire said she hopes the science foundation will be more open, especially since some Internet sites and newspapers such as The New York Times have already mentioned DeepPeep as a more detailed search engine people can use.
Pinnamaneni said they haven’t discussed advertising for the site because it has only been up for the past four months, but it will eventually be an issue.
Luciano Barbosa, a computer science doctoral student, and doctoral students Hoa Nguyen and Thanh Nguyen, contributed to the project.
The site still needs some work, but U students such as Bronson have expressed interest.
“I think it would make the process simpler,” said Daniel Jackson, a junior in mechanical engineering. “It’s like what they do for student loans now. Instead of filling out multiple forms, students can just do it all in one step in FAFSA.”