Search engines in-depth

2013

Searching online has become part of the everyday lives of most people. Whether to look for information about the latest gadget to getting directions to a popular trend, most people have made search engines part of their daily routine. Beyond trivial applications, search engines are increasingly becoming the sole or primary source directing people to essential information. For this reason, search engines occupy “a prominent position in the online world”; they have made it easier for people to find information among the billions of web pages on the Internet. Due to the large number of websites, search engines have the complex task of sorting through the billions of pages and displaying only the most relevant pages in the search engine results page (SERP) for the submitted search query. With the continued growth of the Internet and the amount of websites available, it has become increasingly difficult for sites looking for an audience to achieve visibility. There are millions of new we...

Journal of Health Informatics in Developing Countries, 2009

Search engines are the most common starting point for health searches. More health consumers and health professionals use a search engine as a starting point for health related queries than a website [1]. Most searchers use less than four words, do not look past the first few results [2], are pleased with their results [3] and do not use the advanced features, or other features now available. Health searchers' queries have been found to be suboptimal [2]. This study's objective was to determine how search engines within different categories compare, and to look at features and trends of search engines that are commonly used for queries by both health consumers and professionals. Nine search engines in four categories were objectively and subjectively assessed then ranked. Assessments covered relevance, popularity, usability, website quality and search engine features. Queries relating to five health scenarios were used to formulate query terms. Rankings were summed and ranked again. Features and the impact of Web 2.0 technology in search are also discussed. Search engines within the general category (Google, SearchYahoo!) performed best overall. Meta search engines (Dogpile, Jux2) also performed well with vertical search engines (Healia, Kosmix, Healthline) next. Health portals (Revolution Health, WebMD) produced relevant useful results for common terms, but not for unusual query terms. This study, which is generic in nature and therefore equally applicable to both developed and developing countries, ranked search engines on the Internet. The general and meta search engines ranked higher than the vertical search engines. The health portals provided a fuller social experience, including discussion forums. Google is a good place to start a health search, but knowledge of how a search engine works and using queries that are more effective, may improve results. Rich web technologies (RWT) are changing the search landscape with personalisation, customisation and increased human input influencing the search process.

Questions De Communication, 2008

This English translation has not been published in printed form/Cette traduction anglaise n'a pas été publiée sous forme imprimée. 1 Web search engines are barely ten years old, but they have become familiar and sometimes indispensable tools. Their use has become commonplace in a whole host of everyday life situations, within both professional and private settings (Savolainen, 1995). Planning trips, keeping up with the news, looking for online health information, during key milestones in life, or simply for leisure purposes, individuals are increasingly turning to online resources. Commercial search engines capitalize on this audience: several studies have shown that information retrieval (IR) is one of the most popular uses of the Internet, almost on a par with communication tools such as messaging. According to Comscore Inc. 1 , during the month of June 2008 alone, Americans made 11.5 billion requests to the five major sites that hold the lion's share of online information retrieval: Google (61.5 %), Yahoo (20.9 %), Microsoft (9.2 %), Ask (4.3 %) and AOL (4.1 %). In France, in May 2008 2 , 2.9 billion requests were submitted by 26 million Internet users, which translates into an average figure of 3.6 searches per day, with Google holding 82% of the market share. Médiamétrie/Netratings provides similar figures for May 2008: the study 3 indicates that in France, Google received 26.6 million unique visitors. These results reflect the fact that search engines have become a part of everyday life for Internet users, a trend which highlights the underlying advertising stakes involved. They also show that despite the considerably 4 high number of online search engines, only very few of them have become mainstream.

Intelligence/sigart Bulletin, 2000

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.

2007

Researchers of commercial search engines often collect data using the application programming interface (API) or by "scraping" results from the web user interface (WUI), but anecdotal evidence suggests the interfaces produce different results. We provide the first in-depth quantitative analysis of the results produced by the Google, MSN and Yahoo API and WUI interfaces. After submitting a variety of queries to the interfaces for 5 months, we found significant discrepancies in several categories. Our findings suggest that the API indexes are not older, but they are probably smaller for Google and Yahoo. Researchers may use our findings to better understand the differences between the interfaces and choose the best API for their particular types of queries.

2010

Perhaps the most significant tool of our internet age is the web search engine, providing a powerful interface for accessing the vast amount of information available on the world wide web and beyond. While still in its infancy compared to the knowledge tools that precede it–such as the dictionary or encyclopedia–the impact of web search engines on society and culture has already received considerable attention from a variety of academic disciplines and perspectives.

International Journal of Information Technology and Computer Science, 2016

Past few decades have witnessed an informat ion big bang in the form of World Wide Web leading to gigantic repository of heterogeneous data. A humble journey that started with the network connection between few co mputers at ARPANET p roject has reached to a level wherein almost all the co mputers and other communication devices of the world have joined together to form a huge global in formation network that makes availab le most of the information related to every possible heterogeneous domain. Not only the managing and indexing of th is repository is a big concern but to provide a quick answer to the user's query is also of critical importance. A mazingly, rather miraculously, the task is being done quite efficiently by the current web search engines. This miracle has been possible due to a series of mathematical and technological innovations continuously being carried out in the area of search techniques. This paper takes an overview of search engine evolution from primitive to the present.

Abstract: In this paper, we present Web search engine, a prototype of a Web search engine that makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl, index the Web efficiently, and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/ to engineer a search engine is a challenging task. Search engines index tens to hundreds of millions of web pages involving a comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of millions of queries every day. Despite the importance of large-scale search engines on the web, very little academic research has been done on them. Furthermore, due to rapid advance in technology and web proliferation, creating a web search engine today is very different from three years ago. This paper provides an in-depth description of our large-scale web search engine -- the first such detailed public description we know of to date. Apart from the problems of scaling traditional search techniques to data of this magnitude, there are new technical challenges involved with using the additional information present in hypertext to produce better search results. This paper addresses this question of how to build a practical large-scale system that can exploit the additional information present in hypertext. In addition, we look at the problem of how to effectively deal with uncontrolled hypertext collections where anyone can publish anything they want. Keywords: World Wide Web, Search Engines, Information Retrieval, PageRank, Google. Title: WEB SEARCH ENGINE Author: Raghav Arora, Rana Rahul Sathyaprakash, Saurabh Rauthan, Shrey Jakhetia International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology Research ISSN 2348-120X (online), ISSN 2348-1196 (print) Research Publish Journals

Library Philosophy and Practice, 2019

Evaluation of search engines is necessary to check the retrieval performance of search engines and to differentiate search engines from one another. The ability to retrieve and to rank the relevant result lists can be done by the process of evaluation and this process can take place in two ways viz; human based methods where one can evaluate search engines manually to calculate the significance of the returned results but this method is time consuming and expensive, while as the second is automatic method where one can make use of various techniques like retrieval measures can be used to assess the performance of search engines.

Information Processing & Management, 2006

The Web and especially major Web search engines are essential tools in the quest to locate online information for many people. This paper reports results from research that examines characteristics and changes in Web searching from nine studies of five Web search engines based in the US and Europe. We compare interactions occurring between users and Web search engines from the perspectives of session length, query length, query complexity, and content viewed among the Web search engines. The results of our research shows (1) users are viewing fewer result pages, (2) searchers on US-based Web search engines use more query operators than searchers on European-based search engines, (3) there are statistically significant differences in the use of Boolean operators and result pages viewed, and (4) one cannot necessary apply results from studies of one particular Web search engine to another Web search engine. The wide spread use of Web search engines, employment of simple queries, and decreased viewing of result pages may have resulted from algorithmic enhancements by Web search engine companies. We discuss the implications of the findings for the development of Web search engines and design of online content.

Proceedings of 2nd National Conference on …, 2008

Abstract-With the precipitous expansion of the Web, extracting knowledge from the Web is becoming gradually important and popular. This is due to the Web's convenience and richness of information. To find Web pages, one typically uses search engines that are based on the ...

2008

Abstract We can distinguish two types of web search engines: general use ones that index and search all the web, and site-specific ones that are provided by individual websites for local searching. A comparison of the effectiveness of the two types allows search engine users to choose the right engine and organizations to decide whether they should develop their own search software or purchase the search function as a service. We evaluate the performance of two general purpose search engines and 10 site-specific ones.

In this paper the IRT project (Internet / Information Retrieval Tools) is described. The basic goal of IRT is to advise users of Internet search engines in retrieving information from the free public access part of the Internet. In achieving this, IRT has developed a model to evaluate search engines. This model is described in here. Evaluation criteria refer to functionality: search options, presentation characteristics and indexing characteristics (which elements of a Web document are indexed?). Also evaluated is the consistency of retrieval through search engines. This model has been tested in the period October-December 1998 on six of the major search engines. We found many differences among Internet indexes in their functionality, as well as in their consistency and reliability.

2000

Abstract In studying actual Web searching by the public at large, we analyzed over one million Web queries by users of the Excite search engine. We found that most people use few search terms, few modified queries, view few Web pages, and rarely use advanced search features. A small number of search terms are used with high frequency, and a great many terms are unique; the language of Web queries is distinctive. Queries about recreation and entertainment rank highest.