Search engine effectiveness using query classification: a study

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the retrieval effectiveness of search engines taking into consideration both precision and relative recall.

Design/methodology/approach

The study is based on search engines that are selected on the basis of Alexa (Actionable Analytics for the web) Rank. Alexa listed top 500 sites, namely, search engines, portals, directories, social networking sites, networking tools, etc. But the scope of study is confined to only general search engines on the basis of language which was confined to English. Therefore only two general search engines are selected for the study . Alexa reports Google.com as the most visited website worldwide and Yahoo.com as the fourth most visited website globally. A total of 15 queries were selected randomly from PG students of Department of Library and Information Science during a period of eight days (from May 8 to May 15, 2014) which are classified manually into navigational, informational and transactional queries. However, queries are largely distributed on the two selected search engines to check their retrieval effectiveness as a training data set in order to define some characteristics of each type. Each query was submitted to the selected search engines which retrieved a large number of results but only the first 30 results were evaluated to limit the study in view of the fact that most of the users usually look up under the first hits of a query.

Findings

The study estimated the precision and relative recall of Google and Yahoo. Queries using concepts in the field of Library and Information Science were tested and were divided into navigational queries, informational queries and transactional queries. Results of the study showed that the mean precision of Google was high with (1.10) followed by Yahoo with (0.88). While as, mean relative recall of Google was high with (0.68) followed by Yahoo with (0.31), respectively.

Research limitations/implications

The study highlights the retrieval effectiveness of only two search engines.

Originality/value

The research work is authentic and does not contain any plagiarized work.

Citation

Ali, S. and Gul, S. (2016), "Search engine effectiveness using query classification: a study", Online Information Review, Vol. 40 No. 4, pp. 515-528. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-07-2015-0243