Evaluating search effectiveness of some selected search engines

Abstract

With advancement in technology, many individuals are getting familiar with the internet a lot of users seek for information on the World Wide Web (WWW) using variety of search engines. This research work evaluates the retrieval effectiveness of Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL and Baidu. Precision, relative recall and response time were considered for this evaluation, a total of 24 search queries were sampled based on information queries, navigational queries and transactional queries. They are categorized into single word queries, double word queries, sentence queries and alphanumeric queries. Finally the overall average of all the designated queries shows Bing has the best score based on relative recall with 0.54, Google has the best response time with 0.39s and has the highest precision with 1.37.

Keywords: World Wide Web, Search Engine, Search Query, Links