Measuring the Effectiveness of the WWW Search Engines

Eight World Wide Web search engines are compared on the basis of traditional Information Retrieval measurements Recall and Precision. It is found that the most significant factor that is correlated to precision is the topic of the query. Significant groupings at the level of the search engines themselves are found for both recall and precision. The paper also categorizes search engines by information retrieval features, and examines the appropriateness of recall and precision for evaluating WWW search engines.