Comparative Study Of Some Popular Web Search Engines

Web search engines are veritable tools for information mining. These search engines differ in effectiveness at retrieving relevant documents from the web. A big question is “which search engine(s) is/are best to use in specific instances?” This work evaluates effectiveness of five search engines on fifteen Computer Science queries. Measures obtained from this study include search output quantity, search time, relevant documents retrieved, search precision and the quantity of African contents in the search. Briefly the study shows that (1) the fact that a Web search engine is very popular and able to retrieve large number of documents does not mean that it has high precision for retrieving relevant documents for its users and (2)

Download PDF