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On the Precision of Search Engines: Results from a Controlled Experiment

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Business Information Systems (BIS 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 117))

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Abstract

Handling the growing amount of digital information is one of the major challenges when dealing with the World Wide Web (WWW). In particular, users crave for an effective and efficient retrieval of needed information. In this context, search engines adopt a key role. Besides conventional search engines such as Google, semantic search engines have emerged as an alternative approach in recent years. The quality of search results delivered by search engines is influenced by many criteria. This paper picks up one specific issue, the precision, and investigates and compares the precision of current both conventional (i.e., non-semantic) and semantic search engines based on a controlled experiment with 77 participants. Specifically, Google, AltaVista, MetaGer, Hakia, Kngine, and WolframAlpha are investigated and compared.

This paper was done in the niPRO research project. The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant number 17102X10. More information can be found at http://www.nipro-project.org

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Applied Sciences, Ravensburg-Weingarten, Germany

    Hasan Girit, Robert Eberhard, Bernd Michelberger & Bela Mutschler

Authors
  1. Hasan Girit
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  2. Robert Eberhard
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  3. Bernd Michelberger
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  4. Bela Mutschler
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Poznań University of Economics, Poznań, Poland

    Witold Abramowicz

  2. Vilnius University, Kaunas, Lithuania

    Dalia Kriksciuniene  & Virgilijus Sakalauskas  & 

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Girit, H., Eberhard, R., Michelberger, B., Mutschler, B. (2012). On the Precision of Search Engines: Results from a Controlled Experiment. In: Abramowicz, W., Kriksciuniene, D., Sakalauskas, V. (eds) Business Information Systems. BIS 2012. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 117. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30359-3_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30359-3_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-30358-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-30359-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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