Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Effectiveness Evaluation and Comparison of Web Search Engines and Meta-search Engines

  • Conference paper
Advances in Web-Age Information Management (WAIM 2004)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 3129))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

In this paper we present the experiments which evaluate the effectiveness of a group of Web search engines and meta-search engines. Experimental results show that on average the performances of selected meta-search engines and search engines are very close, therefore, the claim that meta-search engines are more effective than their counterpart-Web search engines can not be supported. Another observation is that, very often, search engines and meta-search engines are doing much better with short queries than with long queries, which is surprisingly opposite to conventional information retrieval systems. It suggests that Web search services focus on short queries having very few key words probably with special efforts; however, the general search techniques they use for long queries are unsophisticated and further improvement is in demand.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. http://www.alltheWeb.com

  2. http://www.altavista.com

  3. McBryan, O.A.: GENVL and WWWW: tools for taming the Web: hyper search engines. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on the World Wide Web, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, May 25-27 (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Brin, S., Page, L.: The Anatomy of a Large-scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 30(1-7), 107–117 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Chu, H., Rosenthal, M.: Search Engines for the World Wide Web: A Comparative Study and Evaluation Methodology. In: Proceedings of ASIS 1996 Annual Conference, October 19-24 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Home, A., Dreilinger, D.: Savvysearch: A meta-search Engine that Learns Which Search Engines to Query. AI Magazine 18(2), 19–25 (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Eguchi, K., Oyama, K., Ishida, E., Kando, N., Kuriyama, K.: Overview of the Web Retrieval Task at the Third NTCIR Workshop. In: Proceedings of the Third NTCIR Workshop (2003), Available at http://research.nii.ac.jp/Web/

  8. Goldschmide, R., Mokotodd, C., Silverman, M.: Evaluation of WWW Search Engines for NIH Implementation. National Institute of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA (January 30, 1997), Available at http://bigblue.od.nih.gov/Websearch/report.htm

  9. Gravano, L.: Querying multiple document collections across the internet. Ph.D. Dissertation. Stanford University, Stanford, CA

    Google Scholar 

  10. http://www.google.com

  11. Gordon, M., Pathak, P.: Finding information on the World Wide Web: the retrieval effectiveness of search engines. Information Processing and Management 35(2), 141–180 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Gauch, S., Wang, G.: Information Fusion with ProFusion. In: WebNet 1996 Conference, San Francisco, USA, October 16-19 (1996), Available at www.ittc.ukans.edu/~sgauch/papers/WebNet96.html

  13. Gauch, S., Wang, G., Gomez, M.: ProFusion: Intelligent Fusion from Multiple, Distributed Search Engines. Journal of Universal Computer Science 2(9), 637–648 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Hawkingm, D.: Overview of the TREC-9 Web Track. In: Proceedings of TREC 9 Conference, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, November 13-16 (2000), Available at http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec9/t9_proceedings.html

  15. Hawking, D., Craswell, N., Thistlewaite, P., Harman, D.: Results and Challenges in Web Search Evaluation. Computer Networks 31(11-16), 1321–1330 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Jansen, B.J., Spink, A., Bateman, J., Saracevic, T.: Real Life Information Retrieval: A Study of User Queries on the Web. SIGIR Fourm 33(1), 95–97 (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Jansen, B.J., Spink, A., Saracevic, T.: Real Life, Real Users, and Real Needs: a Study and Analysis of User Queries on the Web. Information Processing and Management 36(2), 207–227 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Leighton, V.: Performance of four World Wide Web (WWW) Index Services: Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler, and WWWWorm, Available at http://www.winona.msus.edu/services-f/library-f/Webind.htm

  19. Lange, A.: Sorting through Search Engines. Web Techniques Magazine 2(2) (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Ljosland, M.: Evaluation of Web search engines and the search for better ranking algorithms. In: SIGIR 1999 workshop on Evaluation of Web retrieval, Berkeley, USA, August 19 (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Lawrence, S., Lee, C.: Inquiries, the Neci Meta Search Engine. In: Proceedings of the 7th International World Wide Web Conference, Brisbane, Australia, April 14-18, pp. 95–105 (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Leighton, H., Srivastava, J.: Precision among World Wide Web Search Engines: Alta vista, Excite, Hotbot, Inforseek, and Lycos (June 1997), Available at http://www.winnoa.edu/library/Webind2/Webin2.htm

  23. http://www.meracrawler.com/

  24. The MIND project: http://www.mind-project.org/

  25. Meng, W., Yu, C., Liu, K.: Building Efficient and Effective Meta-search Engines. ACM Computing Survey 34(1), 48–89 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Notess, G.: Searching the World Wide Web: Lycos, WebCrawler and More. Online, 19(4), 48–53

    Google Scholar 

  27. Notess, G.: The InfoSeek Database. Database, 85-87

    Google Scholar 

  28. Nance, B.: Internal Search Engines Get You Where You Want to Go. Network Computing Online, October 8 (1997), Available at http://www.nwc.com/819/819cn2.html

  29. Oztekin, B.: Expert Agreement and Content Based Reranking in a Meta-search Environment Using Mearf. In: Proceedings of the 11th International World Wide Web Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, May 7-11, pp. 333–344 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  30. http://www.ProFusion.com/

  31. Stenmark, D.: A Methodology for Intranet Search Engine Evaluation, Available at http://w3.informatik.gu.se/~dixi/publ/method.pdf

  32. Selberg, E., Etzioni, O.: Multi-service Search and Comparison Using the MetaCrawler. In: Proceedings of the 4th international WWW conference, Paris, France, May 6-10 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Selberg, E., Etzioni, O.: The MetaCrawler Architecture for Resource Aggregation on the Web. IEEE Expert 12(1), 8–14 (1997)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. http://trec.nist.gov/

  35. Wishard, L.: Precision Among Internet Search Engines: An Earth Science Case Study (Spring 1998), Available at http://www.library.ucsb.edu/istl/98-spring/article5.html

  36. Spink, A., Wolfram, D., Jansen, B.J., Saracevic, T.: Searching the Web: the Public and Their Queries, Available at http://jimjansen.tripod.com/academic/pubs/jasist2001/jasist2001.html

  37. Wu, S., Crestani, F., Gibb, F.: New Methods of Results Merging for Distributed Information Retrieval. In: Callan, J., Crestani, F., Sanderson, M. (eds.) SIGIR 2003 Ws Distributed IR 2003. LNCS, vol. 2924, pp. 84–100. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  38. Zamir, O., Etzioni, O., Madani, O., Karp, R.: Fast and Intuitive Clustering of Web Documents. In: Proceeding of the ACM SIGMOD International Workshop on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Montreal, Canada, June 1997, pp. 287–290 (1997)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing and Mathematics, University of Ulster, UK

    Shengli Wu

  2. School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK

    Jieyu Li

Authors
  1. Shengli Wu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Jieyu Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

    Qing Li

  2. Shenyang Liaoning, Northeastern University, 110004, China

    Guoren Wang

  3. Dept. of Computer Science & Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Ling Feng

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Wu, S., Li, J. (2004). Effectiveness Evaluation and Comparison of Web Search Engines and Meta-search Engines. In: Li, Q., Wang, G., Feng, L. (eds) Advances in Web-Age Information Management. WAIM 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3129. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27772-9_31

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27772-9_31

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-22418-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-27772-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation