Performance of ten Internet search engines in retrieving scientific literature in Tanzanian public university libraries

Abstract

Several public Search Engines exist of which their coverage and response time differ depending on various factors including connection speed. Now, which one does perform best under the present connection speeds? This study aimed at investigating the information indexing and retrieval effectiveness and efficiency of ten selected search engines under different connection speeds at two University Libraries namely Sokoine National Agricultural Library (SNAL) at Sokoine University of Agriculture and University of Dar es Salaam Library (UDSM). Google followed by Yahoo outperformed all the other eight-search engines in terms of relevance, precision, and responsiveness. In terms of other criteria such as phrase searching, simple and natural language interface, high quality of display results, these search engines were the best. MetaSearch engines especially MetaCrawler performed the worst in indexing and retrieving scientific literature particularly at UDSM library. There was a significant difference of search engines performances between the two connection speeds.


University of Dar es Salaam Library Journal Vol.6(1) 2004: 1-17