Factors Affecting Information Retrieval

Web is a largest information repository containing web pages, continuously expanding with time thus effectively and efficiently searching relevant information on the web is being a challenge. In recent years large numbers of search engines have been introduced which are still dealing with few problems of indexing and retrieval of relevant information. Therefore it becomes essential to evaluate the performance of available search engines. It is mandatory to have a prior knowledge of factors affecting the search engine performance before its evaluation. In this paper, we attempted to identify those factors by taking a sample set of 25 TREC queries. We also explored that the HTML code has an important role in changing the web page ranking which affects the performance of the search engines.