Some Empirical Research on the Performance of Internet Search Engines

In this paper the IRT project (Internet / Information Retrieval Tools) is described. The basic goal of IRT is to advise users of Internet search engines in retrieving information from the free public access part of the Internet. In achieving this, IRT has developed a model to evaluate search engines. This model is described in here. Evaluation criteria refer to functionality: search options, presentation characteristics and indexing characteristics (which elements of a Web document are indexed?). Also evaluated is the consistency of retrieval through search engines. This model has been tested in the period October December 1998 on six of the major search engines. We found many differences among Internet indexes in their functionality, as well as in their consistency and reliability.