10 Chapter 2

Chapter-2 Review of Literature
2. REVIEW OF LITERATURE
Web search is now a major interdisciplinary area of study. Studies on Web
Search Engine crawling and retrieving have evolved as an important area of web
research since the mid-1990s. Many search tools have been developed and
commercially implemented, but little research has been done on the usage,
performance, and information retrieval features of web search engines. A number of
studies have been done so far across the world to examine the features, coverage,
users' effort, relevancy, retrieval capability features, retrieval efficiency (like precision
and recall), etc. of web search engines. On these studies, efforts have been made by
the researcher to review important ones under Review of Literature.
2.1 LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1.1 Concept and Meaning
A literature review discusses published and unpublished information in a
particular subject area, and sometimes information in a particular subject area within a
certain time period. A literature review can be just a simple summary of the sources,
but it usually has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and
synthesis. A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a
synthesis is a reorganisation or reshuffling of that information.
It might give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old
interpretations, or it might trace the intellectual progression of the field, including
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major debates. And depending on the situation, the literature review may evaluate the
sources and advise the reader on the most pertinent or relevant. A review may be self-
contained unit an end in itself or a preface to and rationale for engaging in primary
research. A review is a required part of grant and research proposals and often a
chapter in theses and dissertations.
Generally, the purpose of a review is to analyze critically a segment of a
published body of knowledge through summary, classification, and comparison of
prior research studies, reviews of literature, and theoretical articles.
A literature review is the effective evaluation of selected documents on a
research topic.
The evaluation of the literature leads logically to the research question. A
’good’ literature review:
 is a synthesis of available research
 is a critical evaluation
 has appropriate breadth and depth
 has clarity and conciseness
 uses rigorous and consistent methods
Literature review provides handy guide to a particular topic. If researcher has
limited time to conduct research, literature review can give an overview or act as a
stepping stone. The purpose of literature review is to take a critical look at the
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literature (facts and views) that already exists in the area of the research topic.
Literature can include books, journal articles, internet (electronic journals),
newspapers, magazines, theses and dissertations, conference proceedings, reports, and
documentaries.
2.1.2 Importance of literature review in research
Gall, Borg, and Gall (1996) argue that the literature review plays a role in:
 Delimiting the research problem.
 Seeking new lines of inquiry.
 Avoiding fruitless approaches.
 Gaining methodological insights.
 Identifying recommendations for further research.
 Seeking support for grounded theory.
Hart (1999) contributes additional reasons for reviewing the literature,
including;
 Discovering important variables relevant to the topic,
 Synthesizing and gaining a new perspective,
 Identifying relationships between ideas and practices,
 Establishing the context of the topic or problem,
 Rationalizing the significance of the problem,
 Enhancing and acquiring the subject vocabulary,
 Understanding the structure of the subject,
 Relating ideas and theory to applications,
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 Identifying the main methodologies and research techniques that have
been used; and
 Placing the research in a historical context to show familiarity with state-
of-the-art developments.
Another purpose for writing a literature review not mentioned above is that it
provides a framework for relating new findings to previous findings in the discussion
section of a dissertation. Without establishing the state of the previous research it is
impossible to establish how the new research advances the previous research.
2.1.3 Process of reviewing includes
a. Searching for literature
b. Sorting and prioritizing the retrieved literature
c. Analytical reading of papers.
d. Evaluative reading of papers.
e. Comparison across studies
f. Organizing the content
g. Writing the review
Here researcher referred various online and print resources such as web sites,
articles, books, presentation, conference proceedings and thesis etc. regarding web
search engines.
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2.2 SOURCES OF LITERATURE
The researcher surveyed the following sources of literature to access the
documents and information on web search engines and their information retrieval
features.
The Science Direct is a unique full text database and covers authoritative titles
from the core scientific literature. More than 2,500 journals and more than nine
million full text articles are available in Science Direct.
“Google” Search engine is designed to search for information on the World
Wide Web, which covers bibliographic and full text databases of all articles published
from all journals and covers presentations, articles available from individual web sites
for downloading.
“Google Scholar” provides a simple way of search for scholarly literature
across many disciplines and sources, articles, theses, books, abstracts etc. from
academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other
web sites.
“Emerald” is a global publisher providing with the highest quality, peer-
reviewed research. Management e-Journals are considered essential content by 88 of
the Financial Times Top 100 business schools, whilst specialist e-journals build on
this strength; offering focused international research in a range of fields.
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2.3 REVIEW OF LITERATURE
The research articles collected and studied have been reviewed and their
summary and findings have been furnished hereunder in two groups, namely, Studies
on Web Searching and Studies on Search Engines.
2.3.1 Studies on Web Searching
Gauch and Wang (1996) in their work entitled, ‘Information Fusion with
Pro- Fusion.’ (presented at the first world conference of the web society) made an
attempt on search engines and listed almost of all the major search services and
reported first twenty precision on the basis of twelve search queries. However, they
did not test the significance in the difference reported by the search engines.
Lager (1996) in his work entitled, ‘Spinning a Web Search’ made an attempt
to study web search engines, new search techniques and high degree of precision and
retrieval. He opined that information search and retrieval is of major importance in
locating relevant materials. The ability to aid and assist a user in finding relevant
information is the goal of librarians and information scientists. He targeted toward
WEB searchers, in particular, reference librarians and those who navigate the Internet
on a frequent basis. He also discussed on search engines, comparing search techniques
and noting differences. On the Web, search engines have made the process easier by
incorporating a number of newer techniques which include artificial intelligence,
probability theory, and query by example. With the goal of finding relevant materials,
these new techniques locate information and also refine the search query. He also
presented that search engines have different criteria in creating the indexes, it is most
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useful to use more than one engine in searching the Web to gain relevant information.
As a rule, the more critical or focused the query, the more engines should be applied.
Robots, computers that search the web using these new techniques offer the 'net
searcher a higher degree of precision in retrieval.
Tomaiuolo and Packer (1996) in their work outlined and tested first ten
precessions on two hundred queries and listed the query topics that they searched.
The authors used structured search expressions (using operators) and did not list the
exact expression entered for each service, further reported the mean precision, but
they did not test the significance difference of search engines.
Lawrence and Giles (1998) in their work entitled ‘Searching the World Wide
Web’ made a brief analysis on coverage and recency of the major World Wide Web
search engines, yielding some surprising results. The coverage of any one engine is
significantly limited. No single search engine indexes more than about one-third of
the “indexable Web”, the coverage of the six engines investigated varies by an order
of magnitude, and combining the results of the six engines yields about 3.5 times as
many documents on average as compared with the results from only one engine. The
authors also analysed the overlap between pairs of engines gives an estimated lower
bound on the size of the indexable Web of 320 million pages.
Rajashekar (1998) in his work on Web Search Engines pointed out that
World Wide Web is emerging as an all-in-one information source. He emphasized on
the tools for searching web-based information it includes search engines, subject
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directories, Meta search tools and author also suggested the practical hints for
effective web searching.
Sander–Beurmann and Schomburg (1998) in their work entitled, ‘Internet
Information Retrieval: The further development of Meta Search Engine Technology’
described surprising result that one search engine can’t cover the whole web, so meta
search engines are better than simple search engines. The authors made an attempt on
information retrieval after applying new computing techniques like artificial
intelligence, natural language processing, relevancy feedback, query by example, and
concept based searching gives an efficient information with the meta search engines.
Quible (1999) in his work, ‘Guiding Students in finding information on the
Web’ states that searching for information on the web can be a daunting, frustrating,
mind-boggling, and sometimes-futile activity. Author also pointed out that finding the
right information, one needs to understand the operation of four search tools they are
web directories, search engines, indexes, and spiders or robots. The author elicited the
opinion that understanding Boolean logic helps in efficient web search process.
Gordon and Pathak (1999) in their work compared eight search engines.
The authors calculated traditional information retrieval measures of recall and
precision at varying numbers of retrieved documents and used these as the bases for
statistical comparisons of retrieval effectiveness among the eight search engines.
Further authors pointed out that search engines are essential for finding information
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on the World Wide Web. Finally they calculated that a document retrieved by one
search engine was retrieved by other search engines as well.
Lucas and Tapi (2001) in their study entitled, ‘Form and function: the
impact of query term and operator usage on web search results’ found that queries to
information retrieval systems yield more relevant results if they contain multiple topic
related terms and use Boolean and phrase operators to enhance interpretation. The
findings highlight the need for designing search engine interfaces that provide greater
support in the areas of term selection and operator usage.
Broder (2002) in his work entitled, ‘A Taxonomy of Web Search’ described
that information retrieval is inherently predicated on users searching for information,
the so-called “information need”. But the need behind a web search is often not
informational it might be navigational (give me the url of the site I want to reach) or
transactional (show mee sites where I can perform a certain transaction, e.g. shop,
download a file, or find a map). The author also explored the taxonomy of web
searches and discussed how global search engines evolved to deal with web-specific
needs.
Ford, Miller, and Moss (2002) in their work ‘web search strategies and
retrieval effectiveness: an empirical study’, evaluated web search strategies and
retrieval effectiveness. 341 queries searched on two topics like information
management and information systems retrieved 4000 items using the AltaVista search
engine. The results were analysed by using the factor analysis and regression. The
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authors finally reveal that retrieval Effectiveness was associated positively with best
match searching and negatively with Boolean searching
Chottopadhyay, Dasgupta, and Panigrahi (2003) in their work entitled, ‘A
Study on Web Search Engines and User Interfaces’ described that how a search
begins with a search tool’s Web site and reached by means of its address or URL.
Each tool’s Web site comprises a store of information called a database. Then the
database has links to other databases at other Web sites, and the other Web sites have
links to still other Web sites, and so on and so on. Thus, each search tool has extended
search capabilities by means of a worldwide system of links. A search tool is a
computer program that performs searches and retrieves information. The authors
opined that users today wish to obtain information from any knowledge repository in
the global village; they have to first familiarize themselves with a variety of search
tools and develop effective search techniques. If they wish to take advantage of the
resources from the Internet without spending hours, it is next to impossible. This is
where search engines come into the picture, to sift, sort and present before the users
what they desire from a sea of irrelevant, uncharted and often, unverified information.
The authors also presented that Modern search engines have boosted up research, e-
commerce and other academic activities and enable all sections of users’ communities
to get more resources for their purpose. The authors finally concluded that in order to
cope with different search engines, their tools and techniques, the users must become
familiar with them.
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Dong (2003) in his article entitled, ‘Searching Information and Evaluation of
Internet: A Chinese Academic User Survey’ examined the use of Internet resources
and the evaluation of their usefulness from the perspective of Chinese students and
academics. The author also analyzed the various aspects of internet, background of
the Internet users; the standard of Internet resources; Internet information seeking
behaviour, user’s evaluation of Internet resources and their perceived expectations
about future Internet services.
Meenu Sharma (2003) in her work entitled, ‘Web Search Strategy’ described
the resources are shifting from print to electronic forms and the horizons of
information age have expanded considerably than ever before, thanks to Internet and
World Wide Web making the whole world a global village, thereby leading to such
huge information maze which is beyond imagination. The authors opined that users
need to understand the devise tools & techniques for effective information retrieval.
Further author stated that users need to understand various search tools. Where search
engines, subject’s guides and Meta Search Engines help identify and locate the
information, search logic helps to conceptualize the queries. He also presented that the
librarians who are excited to use wonderful web resources are digging out and
mastering techniques to understand it’s behaviour keeping in mind the fact that the
value of a resource, and its ability to satisfy the information requirements, will vary
for different audiences. The author elicited the opinion that the Internet resources are
dynamic and keeps on changing, so resource evaluation has becomes more difficult
than ever before leading to non-credibility of the results. This magnificent tool for
librarians and informational professionals if properly understood and utilized can
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drastically change the frame of the today’s libraries and librarians building new
relationships with the users, satisfying their information needs in a way they could
never have anticipated.
Tejpal (2003) in his study, ‘Internet and Web Searching’ briefly discussed
about the concept of Internet and web searching with the help of web search engines.
He made an attempt on various aspects of web searching, mathematics of search
engines, search techniques and popular search engines. Further author highlighted the
concepts like plus points, usefulness and disadvantages of different search engines.
The author state that Internet and web searching is very much needed in the digital
society. Finally author concluded that there is great need on the part of library and
information science professionals to contribute constructively and substantially for the
web searching, it is very essential for the librarianship in India. The author mentioned
that the curriculum of library and information science should be redesigned keeping in
view the latest trend.
Varalakshmi (2003) in her study titled, ‘Searching Scientific Information on
the Internet by Academics: A User Survey’ described the importance of the Internet
amongst academics in University environment. Majority of the members of the
academic community are using the Internet for study- or work- related purposes. The
author mentioned that major reason for not using the Internet is lack of access, and
also stated that non users have positive attitude towards the Internet and would like to
use them in future. University library should offer the facility and there is a strong
need for training the end users. Further author highlighted that WWW is being used
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primarily for research information, full text plays an important role, in her survey
enlisted the problems that irrelevant hits, too slow, and lack of organization of
material on web and concerns about quality of information too. The author finally
concluded that however, use of advanced search facilities is very low; hence use of
search engines does not have an optimal effect. This again requires awareness and
skill in the use of subject directories, subject information gateways etc. that
necessitates training. Results of her survey yielding some surprising results that the
primary purpose of using the Internet is for research; Full text is most suitable format;
consulting e-journals is in frequent; Yahoo and Google are the favourite search
engines.
Lahkar and Deka (2004) in their article entitled, ‘Impact of Query Operators
on Web Search Engine Results: An Evaluative Study’ reported that about 90% of web
searchers use simple queries and only 10% use advanced query operators. The authors
compared. In this study, three search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN, in the areas
of coverage and duplication in terms of use of Query Operators. Both search engine
and query operator has a significant effect on coverage. The authors stated that most
current Internet users prefer to use relatively short and simple queries and have
trouble using more complex search features even when they try. The authors also
elaborated on research in the improvement of Web and perhaps other IR systems
should focus on areas beyond Boolean and other query operators. According to
current search engines, however, there is no query operator to define this relation of
context inclusion between query terms. The closest is the ‘+’ operator which only
specifies two terms to appear simultaneously in a document. This might lead to user’s
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constraint to express their need accurately. In order to implement the task of finding
one topic in the context of the other in one pass, web search engine needs to introduce
a new search operator ‘in’. This operator defines that the searching of one query term
should be in the context of the other query term. The authors mentioned that Indexing
quality has an overwhelming effect on retrieval effectiveness and it has been called
one of the grand challenges in the digital libraries realm. Comprehensively indexing
the entire Web and building one huge integrated index will only further deteriorate
retrieval effectiveness, since the Web is growing at an exponential rate. Google is
found at the top in terms of coverage, as compared with the other two search engines,
i.e. MSN Search and Yahoo! The present paper reveals that correct use of query
operators would increase the effectiveness of web searching.
Lewandowski (2004) in a paper titled, ‘Date-restricted queries in web search
engines’ outlined the current state of affairs on web searching, search engines and
information retrieval, about the challenges in indexing the World Wide Web, the user
behaviour, and the ranking factors used by the search engines. He briefly discussed
about the Ranking factors are divided into query-dependent and query-independent
factors, the latter of which have become more and more important within recent years.
Author mentioned the possibilities of these factors are limited, mainly of those that
are based on the wide used link popularity measures. Finally he concluded that
overview of factors that should be considered to determine the quality of Web search
engines.
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Deepak and Parameswaran (2005) in their work entitled, ‘Features in the
Web Search Interface: How Effective Are they?’ opined that web search is getting
more and more popular, and predicted that it would be even more popular in the
coming years, given the exorbitant growth of the web in recent years, search engines,
in their quest to be branded the best, have regularly been providing additional
features. The users of web search interfaces are typically diverse and have wide
ranging interests. This is in contrast to other application interfaces which cater to a
specialized group of people. The present paper examines the influence; interface
manifestation of such features has, in their usability and effectiveness. The authors
mentioned that most of the web search users are casual users who come to the search
engine interface with widely varying intentions and most users who come to the
search engine, prefer to actually type in the search query as soon as possible (and
refine the results later on, if needed) to sitting down and using the pre query
formulation features to generate a query more probable of getting them accurate
results. Initial query formulation features aid more in cluttering up the search
interface. The authors elicited the opinion that reducing the main search interface to
include only very useful and essential features (or filters) would be a good choice.
The authors state that advanced search interface is typically not used extensively.
Giving a useful feature an explicit and expressive manifestation in the advanced
search interface in addition to an operator based access, would perhaps be the best
choice. People seldom like going back to the advanced search interface each time, and
prefer to use the operator once they have understood the feature. Current
representations of useful features are in-fact very much learnable. This is testified by
the observation that people who have used the feature continue to use it. The authors
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mentioned that understandable short descriptions are preferable to eye-catchy ones to
represent features. The survey remarks showed that people generally preferred the
features that aid refinement of search and reformulation of the query.
Mac Farlane (2006) in his work entitled, ‘Evaluation of web search for the
information practitioner’, studied and witnessed that the use of diagnostic measures is
essential in web search, the author mentioned that as precision measures on their own
do not allow a searcher to understand why search results differ between search
engines.
Stronge, Rogers, and Fisk (2006) in their work, ‘Web-Based Information
Search and Retrieval: Effects of Strategy Use and Age on Search Success’, compared
the search efficiency of older adults and younger adults when searching the
information on the web. The authors stated that older adults had more difficulty than
younger adults when searching for information on the Web. This difficulty was
related to the selection of inefficient search strategies, which may have been
attributable to a lack of knowledge about available web search strategies. Authors also
recommended for training to the web users, to search more effectively and suggested
to improve the design of search engines.
Purcell, Brenner and Rainie (2012) in their paper, ‘Pew Internet Research
Project: Search Engine Use’ revealed that how respondents feel about search engines.
In their research analysis stated that In January 2002, 52% of all Americans used
search engines, In February 2012 that figure grew to 73% of all Americans. On any
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given day in early 2012, more than half of adults using the internet use a search
engine (59%). That is double the 30% of internet users who were using search engines
on a typical day in 2004. 91% of search engine users says that most of the time find
the information they are seeking when they use search engines. 73% of search engine
users say that all the information they find as they use search engines is accurate and
trustworthy. 66% of search engine users say search engines are a fair and unbiased
source of information. 52% of search engine users say search engine results have
gotten more relevant and useful over time, while just 7% report that results have
gotten less relevant. The authors revealed some surprising results that Search engines
remain popular and users are more satisfied than ever with the quality of search
results but many are anxious about the collection of personal information by search
engines and other websites. Finally the authors witnessed that overall views of search
engine performance are very positive.
Ding and Ma (2013) in their paper titled, ‘Assessment of university student
web searching competency by a task-based online test’ analysed student web
searching competency. 141 respondents of undergraduate and graduate students from
Wuhan University, China, their searching competency level were assessed by testing
their searching effectiveness and searching efficiency. Student average web searching
competency level was found to be comparatively low overall, within preliminary
stages of development. The authors mentioned that A lot of students are unable to
search the web with efficiency and competency levels for searching academic tasks
were higher than those of daily-life tasks, especially when the degree of difficulty
increased. These two levels, however, have a significant positive correlationship. The
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authors finally stated that information literacy education is vital to teach students
comprehensive web searching competency, which includes knowledge and techniques
for both academic and daily-life search tasks.
2.3.2 Studies on Search Engines
Chu and Rosenthal (1996) in their work ‘Search Engines for the World Wide
Web: A Comparative Study and Evaluation Methodology’ analysed three web search
engines (Alta Vista, Excite, and Lycos). Authors compared and evaluated them in
terms of their search capabilities and retrieval performances using sample queries
drawn from real reference questions. The authors finally concluded that Alta Vista
outperformed Excite and Lycos in both search facilities and retrieval performance,
although Lycos had the largest coverage of Web resources.
Ding and Marchionini (1996) in their work ‘A Comparative Study of Web
Search Service Performance’ described three popular free web search engines
(InfoSeek, Lycos and Open Text) based on their features (databases, indexing quality,
functionality and usability and search performances (precision and relevance
concentration). Authors stated that precision was measured based on the relevance
judgments for the first 20 hits. The authors found little overlap in results among the
three search engines.
Clarke and Willett (1997) in the paper, ‘Estimating the Recall Performance
of Web Search Engines’ outlined the current state of affairs to evaluate the recall of
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the Web search engines in order to consider both recall and precision when evaluating
the effectiveness of search engines.
Brin and Page (1998) in their study titled, ‘The anatomy of a large-scale
hyper textual Web search engine’ described an in-depth description about Google.
Google is a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the
structure present in hypertext, there are new technical challenges involved with using
the additional information present in hypertext to produce better search results. The
authors mentioned that search engines index millions of web pages involving a
comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of millions of queries every
day, build a practical large-scale system which can exploit the additional information
present in hypertext. They also looked at the problem of how effectively deal with
uncontrolled hypertext collection where anyone can publish anything they want. The
authors elicited that opinion that Google is designed to crawl and index the web
efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems.
Schwartz (1998) traced briefly the history of World Wide Web search engine
development and also considers the current state of affairs, and reflects on the future.
He also elaborated on Networked discovery tools have evolved along with Internet
resource availability. He briefly described about World Wide Web search engines
display some complexity in their variety, content, resource acquisition strategies, and
in the array of the tools they deploy to assist users. A small but growing body of
evaluation literature, much of it not systematic in nature, indicates that performance
effectiveness is difficult to assess in this setting. He explained that significant
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improvements in general-content search engine retrieval and ranking performance
may not be possible, and are probably not worth the effort, although search engine
providers have introduced some rudimentary attempts at personalization,
summarization, and query expansion. Finally he concluded that distributed search
across multi type database systems could extend general networked discovery and
retrieval to include smaller resource collections with rich metadata and navigational
tools.
Wang, Xie and Goh (1998) in their paper ‘Quality dimensions of Internet
search engines’ described on quality search engines and pointed out that the user
expectations will be of great help not only to the designers for improving the search
engines, but also to the users for selecting suitable search engine.
Bradely and Mendelsohn (1999) in their paper, entitled, ‘Efficiency in
numbers’ stated and found that maximum (99%) Internet users restrict themselves to
one search engine only few users used up to eight search engines.
Mettrop and Nieuwenhuysen (2001) in their work ‘Internet Search Engines:
Fluctuations in Document Accessibility’ outlined the consistency of retrieval in
thirteen internet search engines like AltaVista, EuroFerret, Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek,
Lycos, MSN, Northern Light, Snap, WebCrawler and three national Dutch engines:
Ilse, Search.nl and Vindex. Authors focused on the degree of consistency to which an
engine retrieves documents. The authors elicited the opinion that three types of
fluctuations in the results sets of several kinds of searches, many of them significant.
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These should be taken into account by users who apply an Internet search engine, for
instance to retrieve as many relevant documents as possible, or to retrieve a document
that was already found in a previous search, or to perform scientometric/bibliometric
measurements. Further authors highlighted on the increasing importance of the
Internet as a publication/communication medium, the fluctuations in the result sets of
Internet search engines can no longer be neglected.
Vidal and Salvador (2001) in their study titled, ‘Search Engine Overlap in
the World Wide Web’ observed the overlapping and duplicacy of information on the
web. The authors found that the search engines results overlap, if user put the same
query in different search engines and the numbers of unique results were very few.
Dennis, Bruza and McArthur (2002) in their study ‘Web Searching: A
Process Oriented experimental study of three Interactive Search Paradigms’
mentioned that users prefer to use queries of about three terms in length for retrieving
document summaries, even in the presence of query refinements that are longer.
Authors elicited the opinion that search effectiveness when using query-based Internet
search (via the Google search engine), directory-based search (via Yahoo), and phrase
based query reformulation-assisted search (via the Hyper index browser) by means of
a controlled, user-based experimental study.
Colaric (2003) in his study titled ‘Instruction for Web Searching: An
empirical study’ author observed that users' searching the Web have difficulty in
using search engines and developing queries. He explained that searches tend to be
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simple, and Boolean operators are used infrequently and incorrectly. Users are
unaware that search engines operate differently from other information retrieval
systems. He mentioned that research has looked at instructional methods for other
types of information retrieval, but these systems differ a great deal from the Web.
Results of his study found that undergraduate students know about search engines and
to examine instructional treatments to aid searchers in using a search engine. However
he stated that there is a need to prepare instructional methods for teaching users about
how to search the web effectively.
Goh and Ang (2003) in their study titled, ‘Relevancy rankings: pay for
performance search engines in the hot seat’ compared the retrieval effectiveness of
Overture and Google using a test suite of general knowledge questions. Finally
authors concluded that Google outperformed, Overture in terms of precision and
number of queries that could be answered.
Johnson, Griffiths and Hartley (2003) in their work ‘Task Dimensions of
User Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems’ examined the performance of three
search engines (Excite, NorthernLight and Hotbot) using a variety of user centred
evaluation measures of information retrieval systems. The authors also mentioned that
the challenge for interactive evaluation in information retrieval is to connect the two
types of evaluation: engine performance and suitability for end-users. The present
paper discusses on the users derived reasons for assigning success rating on the basis
of four criteria: effectiveness, efficiency, utility and interaction. Finally concluded
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that user’s evaluation across the engines would vary, and the multidimensional
approach to evaluation suggests the possible impact of system features.
Pujar, Mungod and Satish (2003) made an attempt to identify and study
various remote search services available on the Internet. Functions, facilities, benefits,
limitations and features of remote search engines are briefed. Author discusses
experiences with these search engines. Authors mentioned that search services are
must for surfers for browsing required information efficiently in minimal possible
time. They are also elaborated on search engine for a website is like an index for a
book, it is a must for any website having pages and remote search services are boom
for webmasters or organizations, as they spend little or nil for the service. However
they are very easy to administer and implement without having much technical
knowledge. The authors elicited the opinion that as a library professional, it will be
more convenient for us as we need not worry much about the technicalities involved
in it. However, by the same time one should have the basic knowledge of HTML to
work with remote search services. The main disadvantage with remote search services
is that they need Internet connection to function. The present paper discusses the
thrust more on free of cost services provided by remote search service providers.
Su (2003) in his work entitled, ‘A comprehensive and Systematic Model of
User Evaluation of Web Search Engines’ studied and developed a systematic model
of user evaluation of web search engines by undergraduates. He observed how 36
undergraduates used four major search engines (AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek and
Lycos) to find information for their own individual problems and how they evaluated
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these engines based on actual interaction with the search engines. User evaluation
was based on 16 performance measures representing five evaluation criteria:
Relevancy, Efficiency, Utility, User satisfaction and connectivity. Finally he
concluded that significant differences in precision ratio, relative recall, user
satisfaction with output display, time saving, value of search results, and overall
performance among the four engines and also significant engine by discipline
interactions on all these measures. Further he also found that none of the four engines
dominated in every aspects of the multidimensional evaluation.
Smith (2003) in his study titled ‘Think local, search global? Comparing
search engines for searching geographically specific information’ evaluated the New
Zealand information by using three local New Zealand search engines, four major
global search engines and three meta search engines. He searches for NZ topics were
carried out on all the search engines, and the relative recall calculated. The author
mentioned that local search engines did not achieve higher recall than the global
search engines or Meta search engines, but no search engine achieved more than 45%
recall. The author revealed some surprising result that theoretical advantage of
searching the databases of several individual search engines, Meta search engines did
not achieve higher recall and 36% of relevant pages for the queries were outside the
.nz domain.
Spink and Jansen (2003) in their study, ‘overlap among major web search
engines’ studied on outlined a study on personal name searching. It is a common but
not a major part of Web searching with few people seeking information on celebrities
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via Web search engines; few personal name queries include double quotations or
additional identifying terms; and name searches. The authors mentioned that Alta
Vista included more advanced search features relative to those on AlltheWeb.com.
Sudesh (2003) in his study on search engines observed that nearly 85% of
people are using only E-mail service on Internet. He also mentioned that finally
people do not realize that E-mail is one of the 10 major services available on Internet
and “Effectively utilizing the available resources” is the key to success. He also
mentioned that how many are really know how to utilize the Internet to its fullest
efficiency. The author revealed some surprising result that Poor queries return poor
results; good queries return great results. Contrary to the hype surrounding "intelligent
agents" and "artificial intelligence," the fact remains that search results are only as
good as the query you pose and how you search.
Can, Suray and Sevdik (2004) in their work ‘Automatic performance
evaluation of web search engines’ opined that measuring the information retrieval
effectiveness of World Wide Web search engines is costly because of human
relevance judgment involved. However, both for business enterprises and people it is
important to know the most effective web search engines, since such search engines
help their users find higher number of relevant web pages with less effort.
Furthermore, this information can be used for several practical purposes. The authors
introduced automatic web search engine evaluation method as an efficient and
effective assessment tool of such systems. The experiments based on eight web search
engines, 25 queries, and binary user relevance judgments show that the method
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provides results consistent with human-based evaluations. The authors stated that the
observed consistencies are statistically significant. The authors also indicated that the
new method can be successfully used in the evaluation of web search engines.
Lewandowski (2004) in his study entitled Date Restricted queries in web
search engines author tested date-restricted queries on the search engines Google,
Teoma and Yahoo! date-restricted searches fail to work properly in web search
engines. Study witnessed that Google performs best with regard to an overall up-to
dateness rate, but does not perform best with each individual query.
Singh and Kapila (2004) in their study titled, ‘Search Engine Tools for
Library’ outlined the current state of affair on the working of Search Engines and
their effective use in searching information on internet on the basis of Boolean
operators. AND, OR, NOT and NEAR, highlights the role of Search Engines in
libraries locating pin pointed information. Finally author concluded that library staff
should have sufficient knowledge of Search Engines to make maximum use of
internet.
Vaughan, L. (2004) in his study entitled, ‘New measurements for search
engine evaluation proposed and tested’ proposed a set of measurement for evaluating
web search performance. Some measurements are adapted from the concepts of recall
and precision, which are commonly used in evaluating traditional information
retrieval systems. Others are newly developed to evaluate search engine stability, an
issue unique to web information retrieval system. He also conducted a test on these
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new measurements by applying them to a performance comparison of three
commercial search engines: Google, AltaVista and Teoma. He also made an attempt
on Twenty-four subjects ranked four sets of Web pages and their rankings were used
as benchmarks against which to compare search engine performance. The author also
indicated that proposed measurements are able to distinguish, search engine
performance very well.
Alshare, Miller and Wenger (2005) published their work, under the title ‘An
Exploratory Survey of Student Perspectives Regarding Search Engines’. The survey
results show that 94% of the students used search engines for class-related activities.
61% of them used search engines one to two times per day and 28% used them three
to four times per day. The authors mentioned that males were more likely than
females to use search engines for news, weather, and sports activities; females were
more likely to use them for travel information. Finally authors concluded that Yahoo
and Google received the highest overall ratings.
Bar-Ilan, Levene and Mat-Hassan (2005) in their study ‘Methods for
evaluating dynamic changes in search engine rankings: a case study’ stated that
Google being more dynamic search engine of its search indexes being unsynchronized
while they are being updated, and the non-deterministic nature of query processing
due to its distributed nature. The author also indicated that the slight differences
between the results produced by Google’s different interfaces.
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Brophy and Bawden (2005) in their article entitled, ‘Is Google enough?
Comparison of an internet search engine with academic library resources’ compared
an internet search engine, Google, with appropriate library databases and systems, in
order to assess the relative value, strengths and weaknesses of the two sorts of system.
The author revealed some surprising results that Google is superior for coverage and
accessibility. Library systems are superior for quality of results. Precision is similar
for both systems.
Ozmutlu (2005) in his article, ‘Performance of question-based vs keyword-
based search engines and effect of web user characteristics on search engine
performance’ described on web user characteristics and choice of search engine
which affect the relevancy scores and precision of the results. The results of two
search engines, Google and AskJeeves, were compared for question and keyword-
format queries. The author mentioned that AskJeeves was slightly more successful in
processing question-format queries, but this finding was not statistically supported.
However, Google provided results on keyword-format queries and the entire set of
queries, which were statistically superior to those of AskJeeves.
Bar-Ilan, Levene and Mat-Hassan (2006) in their article, ‘Methods for
evaluating dynamic changes in search engine rankings: a case study’ analysed to
characterize the changes in the rankings of the top ten results of major search engines
over time and to compare the rankings between these engines. Authors indicated that
the rankings of AlltheWeb were highly stable over each period, while the rankings of
Google underwent constant yet minor changes, with occasional major ones. Changes
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over time can be explained by the dynamic nature of the web or by fluctuations in the
search engines’ indexes. In their analysis stated that top-ten results of the two search
engines had surprisingly low overlap, and with such small overlap, the task of
comparing the rankings of the two engines becomes extremely challenging.
Biradar and Sampath Kumar (2006) in their study entitled ‘Internet search
engines: A comparative study and evaluation methodology’ stated that AltaVista
searched more number of sites while Excite searched least number of sites. In case of
relevancy of search engines majority of relevant sites were found in case of Google
(28%) followed by Yahoo (26%) and AltaVista (20%). The authors also analysed that
more number of irrelevant sites was found in case of Hotbot (61.6%), Lycos (59.6%)
and AltaVista (54.8%).
Chakravarthy and Randhwa (2006) in the paper ‘Academic search engines:
Librarian's friend, researcher's delight’ outlined the current state of affairs on search
engines. The search engines are about excitement, optimism, hope and enrichment,
despair and disappointment. They also mentioned that researcher while using search
engines for resource discovery might have experienced one or the other sentiments;
user satisfaction depends much upon the search strategies deployed by the user. But at
the same time it’s also depends upon the quality of search engine used for information
retrieval. The present paper made an attempt to analyze qualitatively and
quantitatively the three most used and popular search engines for academic resource
discovery, namely Google Scholar, Scirus and Windows Live Academic.
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Chen (2006) in his study explored the library federated search engines
MetaLib and WebFeat as research tools comparing MetaLib with WebFeat by
highlighting their strengths and weaknesses against Google and Google Scholar. The
author revealed some surprising results that MetaLib and WebFeat have fundamental
differences between them. They cannot compete with Google in speed, simplicity,
ease of use, and convenience, nor can they be truly one-stop shopping. The author
also indicated that their strengths lie in the contents they search as well as in the
objective way they retrieve and display results.
Jansen & Spink (2006) in their study entitled ‘How are we searching the
World Wide Web? A comparison of nine search engine transaction logs’ compared
the interactions occurring between users and Web search engines from the
perspectives of session length, query length, query complexity, and content viewed
among the Web search engines. The authors revealed some surprising results that (1)
users are viewing fewer result pages, (2) searchers on US-based Web search engines
use more query operators than searchers on European-based search engines, (3) there
are statistically significant differences in the use of Boolean operators and result pages
viewed, and (4) one cannot necessarily apply results from studies of one particular
web search engine to another web search engine. They also indicated that wide spread
use of web search engines, employment of simple queries, and decreased viewing of
result pages have implications for the development of web search engines and design
of online content.
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Laloo and Lahkar (2006) their paper discussed about ‘Awareness about and
use of internet search engines amongst social science researchers in North East
India’. The authors mentioned that search strategies would help researchers to find
more relevant information, faster, using the Internet is not a waste of time. They also
indicated that Email comes up tops amongst the ten Internet facilities listed, with six
of the respondents claiming to use it daily. Results of their study Google is crowned
number one amongst the eleven search engines listed, by researchers in the North East
too. It is closely followed by Yahoo Excite, Hot Bot and Web Crawler also find
mention with one frequent user of each. Further mentioned that advanced search
options listed, phrase search, truncation and case sensitivity come out as the most
used, followed closely by field searching. Boolean operators don’t seem to be popular
with the respondents. The authors revealed that search engines were considered more
time and energy saving. Even where finding information on North East India is
concerned, Google and Yahoo were credited for giving the fastest and most relevant
results.
Liaw and Huang (2006) in their study entitled ‘Information retrieval from the
World Wide Web: a user-focused approach based on individual experience with
search engines’ described that search engines are the most popular tools for
information retrieval. The author witness four surprising results First, experience with
search engines is a key factor to affect users attitudes toward search engines for
discovering information; second, the query-based service is more popular than the
directory-based service; third, users are not very satisfied with the precision of
retrieved information of search engines and their response time; and fourth,
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motivation is a key factor that predicts individual intention to use search engines for
information retrieval.
Maharana and Mahapatra (2006) in their paper entitled, ‘Google Scholar: A
tool to search scholarly information on the web’ described that Google Scholar is the
scholarly search tool of the world’s largest and most powerful search engine, Google.
The authors mentioned that It enables the users to search for scholarly literature
including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, and technical
reports from all broad areas of research. Google Scholar gets its information directly
from publishers and by crawling the Web for scholarly content. The author revealed
some surprising results that the unique advantages of Google Scholar are its use of
citation indexing, multidisciplinary coverage and scholarly search features. The
authors stated that Google Scholar again serves as a good complement to commercial
databases it offers another resource for locating quality information. Finally they
concluded that availability of online information resources and open access journals
will place Google Scholar at the fingertips of most working scholars. Google Scholar
system will increase its use by those already familiar with it and gain it new users,
data available on Google Scholar may enable us to study the epidemiology of
knowledge on the Web and may be the basis for bibliometric studies.
Spink, A. et al. (2006) in their study entitled, ‘Overlap among major web
search engines’ examined the overlap among the results retrieved by three major web
search engines. The authors mentioned that meta-search engine, such as Dogpile.com,
provides searchers with the most highly ranked search results from three major single
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source web search engines. The authors collected 10,316 random Dogpile.com
queries and ran an overlap algorithm using the URL for each result by query. The
overlap of first result page search for each query was then summarized across all
10,316 to determine the overall overlap metrics. For a given query, the URL of each
result for each engine was retrieved from the database. The analysis states that the
percent of total results unique retrieved by only one of the three major web search
engines was 85 percent, retrieved by two search engines was 12 percent, and retrieved
by all three web search engine was 3 percent. They concluded that small level of
overlap reflects major differences in web search engines retrieval and ranking results.
Evans (2007) in his article, ‘Analysing Google rankings through search
engine optimization data’ elaborated on most popular techniques used to rank a web
page highly in Google. The author also analysed the insight techniques that successful
Search Engine Optimizers use to ensure a page ranks highly in Google.
Jena (2007) in his study entitled ‘Skill development is a new vista for
customizing information retrieval through search engine’ explored on skill
development in retrieving, searching and filtering massive uncontrolled database of
the Web pages. He stated that the role of traditional libraries has been changed by the
introduction of Internet access, so the users now have access to more information than
before; that they must rely on search engine to retrieve and rank the results of their
searching. In his analysis stated that the customer-based information retrieval through
search engine by classifying the need of customer into five categories such as
functional, hedonic, innovative, aesthetic and sign needs of customer. The author also
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indicated that without search engine, searchers would be about as successful
negotiation the Internet as someone trying to look up a phone number in an unsorted
phonebook. Search engine provides three chief facilities (i) search engine helps to
gather information together conceptually, a set of web page which forms the universe
from which a researcher can retrieve information, (ii) search engine represents the
pages in the universe in a fashion that attempts to capture their content, (iii) They
allow searchers to issue queries, employ information retrieval algorithms that attempts
to find most relevant pages from the universe. Finally he concluded that search engine
differ somewhat from each along all these dimensions, World Wide Web (WWW) is a
reposting of information spread all over the world and linked together, WWW is a
unique combination of flexibility, portability and user friendly through the role of
search engine and WWW today is a distributed client- server services, in which a
client using a browser can access a service using a server.
Lewandowski (2008) analysed five web search engines (i.e., Google, Yahoo,
MSN, Ask.com, and Seekport) and their retrieval effectiveness and results. Finally he
concluded that the two major search engines, Google and Yahoo, perform best and
there are no significant differences between them. Google delivers significantly more
relevant result descriptions than any other search engine. This could be one reason for
users perceiving this engine as superior.
Mohanty and Chdamani (2008) made a comparative study of Google and
Yahoo on the percentage of links to other pages (Pointer pages) is high in Google
search than that of Yahoo search. The authors revealed some surprising results that
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while wide range of resources retrieved through Google search is available in
academic domains (.ac), most of the resources retrieved through yahoo search used to
be available on Commercial domains. And most of the resources retrieved through
Google search are available in PDF formats but most of the resources retrieved
through Yahoo are available in HTML formats. It is also been found while searching
through both of the search engines on the same query “Physics India” the same site
reappears on several pages, which reduces the relevancy of the retrieved output. They
mentioned that overall the search result of the Google retrieves more number of
resources on the Physics while Yahoo retrieves less number of sources in comparison
to Google. As well as it has been found that the results of Google haves more
relevancy on the context than that of Yahoo results. Finally authors concluded that to
obtain the most useful results from Google’s and Yahoo’s URL statistics, it is
necessary to develop algorithms and or deploy human labor to avoid the reappearing
of the same sites or sources and then to separate out the different kinds of sites.
Ramprakash et al. (2008) in their article, ‘Role of search engines in
intelligent information retrieval work’ analysed the role of search engines in
intelligent web and a theoretical model to explore intelligent and meaningful retrieval
of information from web are presented. Author opined that with the growth of the
web, information explosion has taken place in the form of “Big Bang”. A well-
support semantic based search engine needs to display the few specific pages from the
billions available in which users have interest. They mentioned that search engines
have become one of the most important and helpful tools for obtaining information
from the Internet, most of the search engines are suffering from drawbacks of human
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and time consumption. The author also indicated that instead of caring about the exact
meaning of semantics of information, the machines on the current web are caring
about the location and display of information only. Because of this shortcoming of
the current web, the search results produced by even most popular search engines are
not satisfactory. Finally author concluded that search engine activities in current web
are not particularly web supported by software tools except for keyword-based search
and suffer from lack of semantics and as well as lack of knowledge of semantics like
RDF, Ontology, Query language like SQL.
Rather, Lone and Shah (2008) in their study titled, ‘Overlap in Web Search
Results: A Study of Five Search Engines’ outlined the overlap among the five search
engines like Google, AltaVista, Hotbot, Scirus and Bioweb. The authors mentioned
that nature of the queries influences overlap, which is more frequent in multiword
(i.e., compound and complex) queries rather than one word queries (i.e., simple
queries). There was no overlap in four of the simple queries, while all the compound
and complex queries produced some overlap between or among the search engines.
Finally authors concluded that 92.53 percent of the URLs are retrieved by one search
engine only (which could be any of the five), 5.22 percent are shared by two, while
2.02 percent and 0.21 percent of the URLs were retrieved by three and four search
engines respectively.
Riahinia and Zandian (2008) in their study entitled ‘Evaluation of
information providers and popular search engines on the base of postgraduate
students' perspectives’ examined the postgraduate students of two universities
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(Tarbiat Moallem and Tarbiat Modares) in Tehran to discover how they use online
databases and general search engines. Authors mentioned that 63.4 per cent of
respondents use online databases, followed by search engines (24.3 per cent), and
print materials (11.3 per cent). The authors revealed some surprising results that
participants ranked Google as the most favorable search engine. In a comparison to
using databases versus search engines, 58.4 per cent of respondents stated that they
use online databases for seeking scientific information, while 33.6 per cent use search
engines.
Thelwall (2008) in his study titled, ‘Quantitative comparisons of search
engine results’ compared the applications programming interfaces of Google, Yahoo!
And Live Search 1,587 single word searches and their hit count estimates were
broadly consistent but Yahoo and Google reported 5-6 times more hits that Live
Search. He mentioned that Yahoo tended to return slightly more matching URLs than
Google and Live Search returning significantly fewer. He also indicated Yahoo
retrieved URLs included a significantly wider range of domains and sites than the
other two, and there was little consistency between the three engines in the Number of
different domains. Finally author concluded that Google is recommended for hit count
estimates but Yahoo is recommended for all other Webometric purposes.
Deka and Lahkar (2010) in their study titled ‘Performance evaluation and
comparison of the five most used search engines in retrieving web resources’
evaluated the performance and efficiency of the five most used search engines, i.e.
Google, Yahoo!, Live, Ask, and AOL, in retrieving internet resources at specific
47
points of time using a large number of complex queries. Authors opined that different
web search engines, which use different technology to find and present web
information, yield different first page search results. Finally they concluded that
Google has a significantly higher rate of performance in retrieving web resources as
compared with the other four search engines. Yahoo! is the second best in terms of
retrieval performance. The other three search engines did not performed satisfactorily
compared with Google and Yahoo!
Sampath Kumar and Pavithra (2010) in their article entitled ‘Evaluating the
searching capabilities of search engines and metasearch engines: a comparative
study’ compared 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 authors mentioned that the first 100
results in each scenario were evaluated and it was found that searches did not achieve
higher precision than the metasearch engines. Authors also found that despite the
theoretical advantage of searching the databasses of several individual search engines,
metasearch engines did not achieve higher recall. Finally authors concluded that
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.
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Van Dijck (2010) in his work entitled, ‘search engines and the production of
academic knowledge’ stated that search engines in general, and Google Scholar in
particular, have become significant co-producers of academic knowledge. He
mentioned that Knowledge is not simply conveyed to users, but is co-produced by
search engines’ ranking systems and profiling systems, none of which are open to the
rules of transparency, relevance and privacy in a manner known from library
scholarship in the public domain. Finally author concluded that in experienced users
tend to trust proprietary engines as neutral mediators of knowledge and are commonly
ignorant of how meta-data enable engine operators to interpret collective profiles of
groups of searchers.
Fagan (2011) in his work entitled, ‘Search engines for Tomorrow's scholars’
opined that today's scholars face an outstanding array of choices when choosing
search tools: Google Scholar, discipline-specific abstracts and index databases, library
discovery tools, and more recently, Microsoft's re-launch of their academic search
tool, now dubbed Microsoft Academic Search. The present paper discusses these
tools' strengths for the emerging needs of scholars? The two-part column explores
scholars' information activities; review how well scholarly search interfaces support
these needs, and highlight these tools' promising features. Finally he concluded that
the first part will outline scholars' search needs and analyze Google Scholar and
Microsoft Academic Search in this context; next issue's column will examine a library
database and a discovery tool and attempt to suggest directions for future
development. In keeping with this column's scope, the focus throughout will be on
interface and system features rather than content.
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Lopez-Pellicer et al. (2011) in their study titled, ‘Discovering geographic web
services in search engines’, examined the performance of Bing (formerly Microsoft
Live Search), Google and Yahoo! in searching standardised XML documents that
describe, identify and locate geographic web services. Author reveals that the
discovery of geographic web services in search engines does not require the use of
advanced search operators. Authors found that a resource-oriented search should
combine simple queries to search engines with the exploration of the pages linked
from the search results. Finally concludes that Yahoo! as the best performer.
Kaur, Bhatia and Singh (2011) in the paper, ‘Web Search Engines
evaluation based on features and end-user experience’ evaluated on Web Search
Engines based on features and end-user experience among the select five search
engines Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, Ask, and Bing. Authors analysed that 57% of the
respondents use search engines (surf the internet) two or more times in a day, 92%
respondents said that Google is easy to use. 72% users access the internet for
educational purpose. The authors concluded that Google is best till date, people like
to search information on Google as it provides better interface, features and ease of
use to the users. It performs better than the other search engines.
Lewandowski (2011) in his paper entitled, ‘web search engine performance
on navigational queries’, i.e. searches for homepages. 100 user queries are posed to
six search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Seekport, and Exalead). Users
described the desired pages, and the results positions were calculated with the mean
reciprocal rank. The performance of the major search engines Google, Yahoo!, and
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MSN was found to be the best, with around 90 per cent of queries answered correctly.
Ask and Exalead performed worse but received good scores as well.
Lopes and Ribeiro (2011) in his paper entitled ‘the retrieval effectiveness of
search engines on navigational queries’ evaluated the general search engines i.e,
Bing, Google, Sapo, and Yahoo and health specific search engines i.e MedlinePlus,
SapoSau´de and WebMD for retrieval of health information by consumers: to
compare the retrieval effectiveness of these engines for different types of clinical
queries, medical specialties and condition severity; and to compare the use of
evaluation metrics for binary relevance scales and for graded ones. The authors
concluded that show that general web search engines surpass the precision of health-
specific engines. Google has the best performance, mainly in the top ten results.
Madhu, Govardhan, and Rajnikanth (2011) in their study entitled
‘Intelligent Semantic Web Search Engines’ opined that the World Wide Web allows
the people to share the information (data) from the large database repositories
globally. The amount of information grows billions of databases. They mentioned that
People need to search for information through specialised tools which are generically
known as Search Engines. The authors also indicated that, there are many search
engines available today, but retrieving meaningful information is difficult. However,
to overcome this problem in search engines and to retrieve meaningful information
intelligently, semantic web technologies are playing a major role. The authors made a
survey on search engine generations and the role of search engines in intelligent web
and semantic search technologies. The authors finally concluded that perspective
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differences between designers and users' perceptions, static knowledge structure, low
precision and high recall and lack of experimental tests.
Martinez et al. (2011) in their paper, ‘New Architectures for Presenting
Search Results Based on Web Search Engines Users Experience’ outlined the current
state of affairs on search engines that the Internet is a dynamic environment which is
continuously being updated. Search engines have been, currently are and in all
probability will continue to be the most popular systems in this information cosmos.
They mentioned that special attention has been paid to the series of changes made to
search engines up to this point, which are currently in common usage. It is also
considered the objectives set for an immediate future in which, undoubtedly, searches
will be increasingly attuned to user needs. The authors also opined that since they
originated, these information recovery systems have seen developments in their
search algorithms and interfaces for presentation of results whilst their users'
information seeking behaviour has changed substantially, making it possible to
distinguish up to three generations (the latest of these is still being developed).
Changes in users' habits and routines when interacting with these systems show a road
map which is increasingly concerned with improving the searching experience.
Finally authors concluded that it is dealt not only with technological development, but
also with an evolving process with regard to the use of information, in turn leading to
a new Internet search paradigm.
Ozcan et al. (2011) in the paper, ‘A five-level static cache architecture for
web search engines’ analysed the performance of web search engines and stated that
caching is a crucial performance component of large-scale web search engines as it
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greatly helps reducing average query response times and query processing workloads
on backend search clusters. They described a multi-level static cache architecture that
stores five different item types: query results, pre-computed scores, posting lists, pre-
computed intersections of posting lists, and documents. Finally they concluded that a
greedy heuristic to prioritize items for caching, based on gains computed by using
items’ past access frequencies, estimated computational costs, and storage overheads.
Brin and Page (2012) in the paper, ‘the anatomy of a large-scale hyper
textual Web search engine’ outlined the current state of affairs on Google, a prototype
of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in
hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce
much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full
text and hypertext database of at least 24 million pages is available at
http://google.stanford.edu/. The authors argue that to engineer a search engine is a
challenging task. Search engines index tens to hundreds of millions of web pages
involving a comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of millions of
queries every day. The author mentioned that due to rapid advance in technology and
web proliferation, creating a web search engine today is very different from 3 years
ago. They also explained the problems of scaling traditional search techniques to data
of this magnitude, there are new technical challenges involved with using the
additional information present in hypertext to produce better search results. The
present paper addressed the question of how to build a practical large-scale system
which can exploit the additional information present in hypertext. The authors also
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looked at the problem of how to effectively deal with uncontrolled hypertext
collections, where anyone can publish anything they want.
Kayaaslan, Cambazoglu, and Aykanat (2012) in their study entitled
‘Document replication strategies for geographically distributed web search engines’
opined that user query is processed in a data centre that is geographically close to the
origin of the query, over a replica of the entire web index. Compared to a centralized,
single- centre search engine, this architecture offers lower query response times as the
network latencies between the users and data centres are reduced. However, it does
not scale well with increasing index sizes and query traffic volumes because queries
are evaluated on the entire web index, which has to be replicated and maintained in all
data centres. In their analysis states that as a remedy to this scalability problem, they
propose a document replication framework in which documents are selectively
replicated on data centres based on regional user interests. Within this framework,
they propose three different document replication strategies, each optimizing a
different objective: reducing the potential search quality loss, the average query
response time, or the total query workload of the search system. For all three
strategies, they consider two alternative types of capacity constraints on index sizes of
data centres. Finally they concluded that investigate the performance impact of query
forwarding and result caching, they evaluated the strategies via detailed simulations,
using a large query log and a document collection obtained from the Yahoo! web
search engine.
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Abrahams and Barkhi (2013) in his study, ‘Concept comparison engines: A
new frontier of search entitled’, mentioned that in a traditional search engine
interaction scenario, a user begins with a certain concept and finds documents that are
similar to their concept. However, the user may wish to compare alternatives and a
search capability should compare concepts and present the best alternatives. This task
can be difficult without proper decision aids. They propose a concept comparison
engine as a decision support tool that may be used to compare attributes of different
alternatives and aid in making an informed selection. Authors describe architecture,
an interaction scenario and implemented a prototype. They also elaborated a number
of evaluation metrics for measuring the viability of different terms for the purpose of
comparing concepts. Finally they concluded that in scripted experiments, orderings
for candidate terms from the prototype are compared to gold standard ranking lists
from structured external sources. Our results indicate that a Rank or analysis may be
promising as a measure of the differentiating power of candidate terms a user might
choose to support concept comparison.
Nadjla (2013) analysed the performance of Natural Language (NL) in search
engines in retrieving exact answers to the NL queries differs from that of keyword
searching search engines. 40 natural language queries were posed to Google and three
NL search engines: Ask.com, Hakia and Bing. The first results pages were compared
in terms of retrieving exact answer documents and whether they were at the top of the
retrieved results, and the precision of exact answer and relevant documents. Ask.com
retrieved exact answer document descriptions at the top of the results list in 60 percent
of searches, which was better than the other search engines, but the mean value of the
55
number of exact answer top list documents for three NL search engines (20.67) was a
little less than Google’s (21). There was no significant difference between the
precision for Google and three NL search engines in retrieving exact answer
documents for NL queries.
Jato and Oresiri (2013) made an attempt to study students' use of search
engines for information retrieval on the web in Adeyemi College of Education, Ondo,
the authors found out that majority of the respondents (63.12%) had no specific place
for their online search; they used their mobile phones / laptop everywhere to search
the internet. Only a very few of respondents (3.55%) used virtual library for their
online search, many of the respondents (39.01%) used the search engine occasionally
and majority of students (71.63%) used just one or two search engines on regular
basis. The authors finally concluded that students should be enlightened on the
importance of online resource for their academic success to propel them to use search
engines.
Ramaraj (2013) in his study, ‘Evaluation of search engines: A conceptual
model and research issues’ proposed an evaluation method for search engines by
developing a conceptual model based on the literature. He mentioned that model
identifies the key factors that influence user evaluation of search engines, effective
and efficient criteria for evaluation by considering user satisfaction and usage as the
search engine success variables. He also elaborated that the model attempts to identify
the attributes that determine a good search engine, why users repeatedly visit their
favourite search engines, and why users switch between different search engines. The
authors finally concluded that the relevance of the results with utility plays a crucial
56
role in revisiting the search engine by the users. The research issues are evolved out
the conceptual model and the implications for searchers and search engine providers
are given.
White (2013) made a study on search engines and published it with the title
‘Search engines: Left side quality versus right side profits’. He stated that Search
engines face an interesting trade off in choosing the way to display their results.
While providing high quality unpaid, or “left side” results attracts users, doing so can
also cannibalize the revenue that comes from paid ads on the “right side”. The present
paper examines this tradeoff, focusing, in particular, on the role of users' post-search
interaction with the websites whose links are displayed. He also elaborated on the
model, high quality left side results boost demand from users, causing them to tolerate
a search engine on which advertisers do not offer the lowest possible prices for the
goods that they sell. Finally he concluded that websites appearing on the left side still
have an incentive to compete in the same market as advertisers, an increase in quality
on the left side may reduce advertisers' equilibrium prices. Author analyzed the
circumstances under which this will occur and discuss the model's potential
implications for antitrust policy.
Egri and Bayrak (2014) in their paper entitled, ‘The Role of Search Engine
Optimization on Keeping the User on the Site’ mentioned that 93% of internet traffic
is managed by search engines, exploring the potential of search engines is crucial, it
shows the critical role of search engines on routing users to the right websites. Due to
the important effects of search engines, search results are getting more crucial for
websites to compete with other rivals. They also mentioned that the most important
57
part of defeating other rivals is optimization of search engines, after this optimization,
website owners expect that the search engine results display their website first, before
other websites. The authors finally concluded that the study is to scientifically justify
the importance of search engines and search engine optimization (SEO). The author
reveals some surprising results that the main focus was to measure the significance of
time, speed, reduced bounce rate, page views, and page layout in keeping the user on
the site.
Kim and Tse (2014) in their article entitled Search engine competition with a
knowledge-sharing service’ compared the competition between an inferior search
engine and a superior search engine with the option to introduce a knowledge-sharing
service. The author focuses on the pure strategy, Nash equilibrium of the competition
between inferior and superior search engines attempting to maximize their either
profits or market shares. If one search engine introduces a knowledge-sharing service,
it decides whether to make its answer database accessible by the other competing
search engine. They also elaborated on the compatibility decision of each search
engine is shown to be significantly influenced by whether it maximizes its profit or
market share. The superior search engine should keep its answer database closed to
maximize its market share, but may make its answer database open to maximize its
profit unless the amount of information available on the Internet is small. The inferior
search engine should keep its answer database open to maximize its market share if its
search technology is far behind that of the superior search engine. Both the inferior
and superior search engines should make their answer databases open to maximize
their profits if the amount of information available on the Internet is large. Finally
58
authors revealed some surprising results that equilibrium strategies for inferior and
superior search engines depend primarily on the amount of information available on
the Internet, the degree of searchers' patience to wait for answers, and the search
quality difference.
2.3 CONCLUSION
The Review of Related Literature presented in this chapter dealt with the
articles studied by the researcher.
 There are altogether 88 articles from books, journals and theses have been
collected and studied. The articles cover the period of two decades, that is,
1996 to 2014.
 The reviews were presented under two sub-headings: Studies on Web
Searching and Studies on Search Engines.
 The studies on Web Searches mainly dealt with the comparison of retrieval
efficiency. Google appears to be dominating the other search engines with
its advanced features, performance at query processing and retrieval
efficiency. The recent studies also show that Google is superior for its
coverage and accessibility.
 The articles on these topics mainly appeared in the journals like Online
Information Review, Journal of Documentation, Journal of American
Society for Information Science and Technology, Electronic Library,
Information Processing and Management, Aslib Proceedings, etc.
 There are few major studies on search engines and their information
retrieval features by Indian researchers. Hence, there is a need to study this
aspect to fill the gap.
59
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Chapter-2 Review of Literature

Web search is now a major interdisciplinary area of study. Studies on Web

performance, and information retrieval features of web search engines. A number of

the researcher to review important ones under Review of Literature.

2.1 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1.1 Concept and Meaning

A literature review discusses published and unpublished information in a

synthesis. A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a

synthesis is a reorganisation or reshuffling of that information.

interpretations, or it might trace the intellectual progression of the field, including

chapter in theses and dissertations.

Generally, the purpose of a review is to analyze critically a segment of a

published body of knowledge through summary, classification, and comparison of

prior research studies, reviews of literature, and theoretical articles.

A literature review is the effective evaluation of selected documents on a

The evaluation of the literature leads logically to the research question. A

’good’ literature review:

 is a synthesis of available research

 has appropriate breadth and depth

 has clarity and conciseness

 uses rigorous and consistent methods

Literature review provides handy guide to a particular topic. If researcher has

Literature can include books, journal articles, internet (electronic journals),

newspapers, magazines, theses and dissertations, conference proceedings, reports, and

2.1.2 Importance of literature review in research

 Delimiting the research problem.

 Seeking new lines of inquiry.

 Avoiding fruitless approaches.

 Gaining methodological insights.

 Identifying recommendations for further research.

 Seeking support for grounded theory.

Hart (1999) contributes additional reasons for reviewing the literature,

 Discovering important variables relevant to the topic,

 Synthesizing and gaining a new perspective,

 Identifying relationships between ideas and practices,

 Establishing the context of the topic or problem,

 Rationalizing the significance of the problem,

 Enhancing and acquiring the subject vocabulary,

 Understanding the structure of the subject,

 Relating ideas and theory to applications,

 Identifying the main methodologies and research techniques that have

been used; and

 Placing the research in a historical context to show familiarity with state-

section of a dissertation. Without establishing the state of the previous research it is

2.1.3 Process of reviewing includes

a. Searching for literature

b. Sorting and prioritizing the retrieved literature

c. Analytical reading of papers.

d. Evaluative reading of papers.

e. Comparison across studies

f. Organizing the content

g. Writing the review

2.2 SOURCES OF LITERATURE

The researcher surveyed the following sources of literature to access the

million full text articles are available in Science Direct.

“Google” Search engine is designed to search for information on the World

“Google Scholar” provides a simple way of search for scholarly literature

academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other

“Emerald” is a global publisher providing with the highest quality, peer-

reviewed research. Management e-Journals are considered essential content by 88 of

this strength; offering focused international research in a range of fields.

2.3 REVIEW OF LITERATURE

on Web Searching and Studies on Search Engines.