خلاصة:
Six Web search engines, namely, Altavista, Excite, Go, Cioog le, I-lot Bot and Lycos, were compared and evaluated in terms ot their search capabilities (i.e., duplicate, false drops, mirror sites, dead links) and retrieval performances (i.e., precision) using sample queries drawn from real reference questions from the reference desk of the Central Library of Shiraz Uni varsity (Mirzay-e-Shirazi Library). Recall, another evaluation criterion of information retrieval, is deliberately omitted from this study; because, it is impossible to assume how many relcvant items there are for a particular query in the hugc and ever changing Web system. Thc authors of this study found that Google showed the best performance, although Altavista had the largest coverage of Web resources amongst the six Web search engines examined.
ملخص الجهاز:
Reference librarians like a great number of library patrons try to use the Web search tools to answer reference questions.
But as a pitfall, directory services are limited and small [1], primarily due to the high cost of creating, maintaining and finding new resources in the face of constant change and growth of the Web. In contrast to directories, search engines, such as Google, provide broad coverage of the Web through intensive automation of the indexing and retrieval process.
The motivation of this study is based on the fact that identifying the most effective Web search engine(s) satisfying the current information-needs is important both to librarians and users.
Leighton and Srivastava [25] (View the image of this page) Iranian Journal of Information Science & Technology, Volume 3, Number 1 compared 4 search engines and toutid that the best search engine was Altavista.
Mowshtiwitz & Kawaguchi [29] and Vaughan & Thelwall [46] evaluated bias in different search engines on the World Wide Web. In more recent studies, information seeking behavior of users in free search engines have been in focus.
In most related studies, researchers came to the conclusion that it is almost impossible to evaluate the relevancy of a large number of pages retrieved by search engines.
CONCLUSIONS The application of the Web search engines to answer general reference questions depends Iranian Journal of Information Science & Technology, Volume 3, Number 1 January/June, 2005 on high precision of results and less duplicates and false drops in findings.