Kumar & Pavithra: Evaluating the Searching Capabilities of Search Engines

Compares the searching capabilities of two search engines (Google and Yahoo) and two metasearch engines (Metacrawler and Dogpile) on the basis of the precision value and relative recall. Fifteen queries which represented a broad range of library and information science topics were selected and each query was submitted to the search engines and metasearch engines. The first 100 results in each scenario were evaluated and it was found that search engines did not achieve higher precision than the metasearch engines. It is also found that despite the theoretical advantage of searching the databases of several individual search engines, metasearch engines did not achieve higher recall. The results of the study offer guidance for internet surfers to choose appropriate search tools for information retrieval. It also provides some inputs to search engine designers to make search engines’ search capabilities more efficient.