STARTS is the result of an informal "standards" effort that we (Luis Gravano, Kevin Chang, Hector Garcia-Molina, Carl Lagoze, and Andreas Paepcke) coordinated at Stanford. This project developed a simple protocol that text search engines should follow to facilitate searching and indexing multiple collections of text documents.
Final writeup of the STARTS protocol (PostScript version)
A reference-implementation of STARTS by Carl Lagoze
A more readable description of the STARTS protocol that appeared in Sigmod'97
List of participants of the STARTS Workshop, Stanford, August 1st, 1996
Slides of the talk that Prof. Hector Garcia-Molina gave at the STARTS workshop (Powerpoint Version)
Slides of the talk that Luis Gravano gave at the STARTS workshop (Powerpoint Version)