Search engines and their search performance in retrieving internet resources an evaluative study

Abstract

The World Wide Web (WWW) is revolutionizing the way that people access information, and has opened up new possibilities in areas such as digital libraries, general and scientific information dissemination and retrieve, education, commerce, entertainment, government and health care. This amount of publicly available information on the web is increasing rapidly, as it includes more than 19 billion pages as announced by Yahoo in 2005. The number of web pages now growth around 30 billions. Add to this, the fact that the web lacks the bibliographic control standards we take for granted in the print media. Instead of a central catalogue, the web offers the choice of dozens of different search tools. This leads to the development of different search engines and subject directories. It has been observed that most users view search engines and as the best method available for finding information on the Web. The goal of the present study is to conduct a large-scale study to measure the performance and efficiency of search engines on the first result page across the five most popular search engines, at specific points of time using a large number of complex queries. Based on the study conducted by the different organizations and survey agencies on the popularity of the search engines, five search engines have been selected for the study, i.e. AOL, Ask, Google, Live, and Yahoo. The entire study has been organized into seven chapters, namely, (i) Introduction, (ii) Literature Review, (iii) Web Based Information Retrieval Systems, (iv) Search Engines: Growth and Development, (v) Searching Strategies of Selected Search Engines, (vi) Evaluvating Search Performance: Based on Survey, and (vii) Findings and Conclusion. The key findings of this research are- the basic concept of search strategies and searching processes of all the five search engines is remaining same. There are significant differences among the search engines in terms of coverage, relevancy, uniqueness, and stability. Although there is difference among the search...