Spanish web searching tools: An exploratory study

Libri, 2006

Proc. of ACM SIGIR 2007 Workshop on Improving Non-English Web Searching (iNEWS07), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2007. ISBN 978-84-690-6978-3 (78 pp.), 2007

Conference (SIGIR'07) aiming at bringing together researchers interested in non-English web searching.

Information Retrieval, 12(3):230-250, 2009. ISSN 1386-4564. DOI 10.1007/s10791-009-9093-0, 2009

With increasingly higher numbers of non-English language web searchers the problems of efficient handling of non-English Web documents and user queries are becoming major issues for search engines. The main aim of this review paper is to make researchers aware of the existing problems in monolingual non-English Web retrieval by providing an overview of open issues. A significant number of papers are reviewed and the research issues investigated in these studies are categorized in order to identify the research questions and solutions proposed in these papers. Further research is proposed at the end of each section.

ACM SIGIR Forum, 41(2):72-76, 2007. ISSN 0163-5840., 2007

Conference (SIGIR'07) aiming at bringing together researchers interested in non-English web searching.

2008

07). The workshop aims at bringing together researchers interested in the issues surrounding non-English web searching. Nowadays, over 60% of Internet users are non-English speakers and the number of non-English speaking Internet users is growing faster than the English speaking. Recent studies showed that non-English queries and unclassifiable queries have nearly tripled since 1997. Most search engines were originally engineered for English. These do not take into full account the specifics of non-English languages, such as, inflectional semantics nor diacritics or capitalization. The main conclusion from the literature is that searching using non-English and non-Latin based queries results in lower retrieval success and requires additional user effort so as to achieve acceptable satisfaction levels. Furthermore, international search engines, like MSN Live, Google and Yahoo, are relatively weaker with monolingual non-English queries. New tools and resources are needed to support researchers in non-English retrieval, new methodologies need to be proposed which will help the identification of problems in existing search engines and new teaching strategies should be formed aiding users to become more efficient in formulating their queries. Foremost, research in non-English web search should provide an incentive to search engines to improve the retrieval performance of their engines for non-English languages.

Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web - WWW '15 Companion, 2015

Online searching is a central element of internet users' information behaviors. Searching is usually executed in a user's native language, but searching in English as a foreign language is often necessitated by the lack of content in languages that are underrepresented in Web content. This paper reports results from a study of searching in English as a foreign language and aims at understanding this particular group of users' behaviors. Searchers whose native language is not English may have to resort to queries in English in support of their information needs due to the lack or low quality of the web content in their own language. However, when searching for information in a foreign language, users face a unique set of challenges that are not present for native language searching. We studied this problem through qualitative research methods and report results from focus groups in this paper. The results reported in this paper describe typical problems foreign language searchers face, the differences in informationseeking behavior in English and in the participants' native language, and advice and ideas shared by the focus group participants about how to search effectively and efficiently in English.

2006

In the complex decision-environments that characterize e-business settings, it is important to permit decision-makers to proactively manage data quality. In this paper we propose a decision-support framework that permits decision-makers to gauge quality both in an objective (context-independent) and in a context-dependent manner. The framework is based on the information product approach and uses the Information Product Map (IPMAP). We illustrate its application in evaluating data quality using completeness-a data quality dimension that is acknowledged as important. A decision-support tool (IPView) for managing data quality that incorporates the proposed framework is also described.

Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 1996

Three Web search engines, namely, Alta Vista, Excite, and Lycos, were compared and evaluated in terms of their search capabilities (e.g., Boolean logic, truncation, field search, word and phrase search) and retrieval performances (i.e., precision and response time) using sample queries drawn from real reference questions. Recall, the other evaluation criterion of information retrieval, is deliberately omitted from this study because it is impossible to assume how many relevant items there are for a particular query in the huge and ever changing Web system. The authors of this study found that Alta Vista outperformed Excite and Lycos in both search facilities and retrieval performance although Lycos had the largest coverage of Web resources among the three Web search engines examined. As a result of this research, we also proposed a methodology for evaluating other Web search engines not included in the current study. 6. Out of the 10 downloaded Web records, there are 2 duplicates. 7. All the figures were obtained in January 1996.

2010

Search engines are competing to be seen as universal, consistent and language independent. In principle, users searching for information through the Internet should get consistent information regardless of the language of the words they are searching for and regardless of the language of the matching or the relevant documents. Nevertheless, the language should affect the sequence or the ranking of the retrieved results. In this project, several tools are built to evaluate words and statements in several languages. Results are evaluated and compared for possible correlation. Another tool is built to crawl websites from different languages and locations in order to measure several aspects of those websites. Results from both studies showed that while it seems that popular search engines are making very good progress toward building search engines that are language and location independent, however, there are some limitations and situations where search for results can be biased toward the popularity of the website language and/or location.

Text Retrieval Systems (TRS) are a well-known type of program in the sphere of information and documentation, especially as they are designed for the retrieval of text and cognitive documents. The main characterisitcs can be summarized as follows: they have a flexible record model (variable length fields, multiple value fields, etc.), they facilitate access to logs through reverse indexing, contain a varied set of data-recovery features, and are provided with diverse instruments for terminology control. Some of the best known and prevalent systems are CDS/ISIS, FileMaker, Knosys, and Inmagic DB/Text. Global theories of approach have been developed about them, among which we can highlight that of Sieverts and other Belgian researchers (1991-93), authors of a series of very complete and exhaustive articles that describe the characterisitics of these types of programs, elaborating a typology and presenting a very detailed evaluation of some thirty products. Subsequently, William Saffad...