Search results

One of the most effective ways information retrieval (IR) systems including Web search engines can improve relevance performance is to provide their users with tools for facilitating query expansion. Search engines such as Google provide users with keyword suggest tools. This paper aims to investigate users’ criteria in relevance judgment regarding Google’s keywords suggest tool and to see how such keywords would lead to more relevant results from the viewpoint of users.

Through a mixed method approach, quantitative and qualitative data were collected from 60 postgraduate students at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran, using four different instruments (questionnaire, thinking aloud technique, query logs and interviews).

Among other criteria, the “relation between suggested keywords and the information need” (with the mean rate of 3.53 of four) was considered the most important by searchers in selecting suggested keywords for query expansion. Also, the “relation between suggested Keywords and the retrieved items” (with the mean rate of 3.62) was considered the second most important criterion in judging the relevance of the retrieved results. The participants agreed that the suggested keywords by Google improved the retrieval relevance. The content analysis of the participants’ aloud-thinking sessions and the interviews approved such findings.

This research makes a contribution to the need of designers of IR systems regarding the use of add words for query expansion. It also helps librarians how to instruct searchers with expanding their queries to retrieve more relevant results. Another contribution of the study is the identification of a number of new relevance judgment criteria for Web-based environments.

With the rise of alternate discovery services, such as Google Scholar, in conjunction with the increase in open access content, researchers have the option to bypass academic libraries when they search for and retrieve scholarly information. This state of affairs implies that academic libraries exist in competition with these alternate services and with the patrons who use them, and as a result, may be disintermediated from the scholarly information seeking and retrieval process. Drawing from decision and game theory, bounded rationality, information seeking theory, citation theory, and social computing theory, this study investigates how academic librarians are responding as competitors to changing scholarly information seeking and collecting practices. Bibliographic data was collected in 2010 from a systematic random sample of references on CiteULike.org and analyzed with three years of bibliometric data collected from Google Scholar. Findings suggest that although scholars may choose to bypass libraries when they seek scholarly information, academic libraries continue to provide a majority of scholarly documentation needs through open access and institutional repositories. Overall, the results indicate that academic librarians are playing the scholarly communication game competitively.

The use of search engines is the most widely acceptable way for information foraging on the net. Their wide use as an information retrieval tool has created the need for their evaluation as a means of improving their performance. This research attempts to record Greek librarians' views on search engines: their performance and characteristics.

A total of 16 librarians were asked to search for a specific topic using eight search engines; four international (google.com, altavista.com, yahoo.com, exalead.com) and four Greek (google.gr (searching only for Greek text), in.gr, robby.gr, find.gr). Eight questionnaires were completed by each participant; one for every search engine. A total of 128 initial searches were performed by the librarians, followed by 86 further searches with changed search terms. The librarians recorded their experiences in retrieving information and evaluated the first 20 results according to the criteria of precision, relevancy of the retrieved records and the way the results were displayed by each search tool.

Analysis of the results leads to conclusions about librarians' familiarity with search engines and their views on the retrieved information. The results indicated that participants were satisfied by the presentation, the visualization, the quality and value of results and they were very satisfied with the search engines' interfaces. Thus, most retrieved items were relevant and so the degree of precision was satisfactory. Users preferred mainly international search engines rather than Greek search engines. It was evident that most librarians were very satisfied with the performance of the search engines and felt that their queries had been answered successfully.

The paper presents one of the few studies regarding international and Greek search engines and their use by librarians. The study gathered data with regard to the views of Greek librarians on the use of search engines and their characteristics. In addition, it recorded the attitude of librarians to both the search process and subsequent information retrieval, using Greek and international search engines. It compared different search engines and studied parameters like quality, precision, presentation and value of the search results. This research could form the basis of further study of librarians' behavior in the use of search engines for satisfying their information needs and comparison of information retrieval systems.

The aim of this study was an evaluation of the web as a source of scientific bibliographic information.

In order to give this evaluation a quantitative dimension, a comparison with the information obtained from fee‐based bibliographic databases was performed. Based on a concrete search example in the field of plant production biotechnology, a comparative study of selected fee‐based bibliographic databases (CAB Abstracts and Biosis Preview) and a search of the web with selected search engines (Scirus and Google) was carried out. A comparison of the information retrieved through the databases and that retrieved through search engines was conducted with respect to the quantity and quality of retrieved documents, search time, the cost of information, retrieval strategies, the reliability of information and the demands on the skills of the searcher.

The surprising results of this comparison clearly indicate that the web, assuming a professional use of the medium, is not only a valuable source for scientific information, but also provides the scientific community with an instrument to make knowledge available and accessible for almost anyone.

This study shows that the web has reached a certain level of maturity in regard to scientific and qualitative content and can be considered a worthwhile source of scientific information.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a summarization method to enhance the current web-search approaches by offering a summary of each clustered set of web-search results with contents addressing the same topic, which should allow the user to quickly identify the information covered in the clustered search results. Web search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo!, rank the set of documents S retrieved in response to a user query and represent each document D in S using a title and a snippet, which serves as an abstract of D. Snippets, however, are not as useful as they are designed for, i.e. assisting its users to quickly identify results of interest. These snippets are inadequate in providing distinct information and capture the main contents of the corresponding documents. Moreover, when the intended information need specified in a search query is ambiguous, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for a search engine to identify precisely the set of documents that satisfy the user’s intended request without requiring additional information. Furthermore, a document title is not always a good indicator of the content of the corresponding document either.

The authors propose to develop a query-based summarizer, called Q_Sum, in solving the existing problems of Web search engines which use titles and abstracts in capturing the contents of retrieved documents. Q_Sum generates a concise/comprehensive summary for each cluster of documents retrieved in response to a user query, which saves the user’s time and effort in searching for specific information of interest by skipping the step to browse through the retrieved documents one by one.

Experimental results show that Q_Sum is effective and efficient in creating a high-quality summary for each cluster to enhance Web search.

The proposed query-based summarizer, Q_Sum, is unique based on its searching approach. Q_Sum is also a significant contribution to the Web search community, as it handles the ambiguous problem of a search query by creating summaries in response to different interpretations of the search which offer a “road map” to assist users to quickly identify information of interest.

In vol. 6, 1976, of Advances in Librarianship, I published a review about relevance under the same title, without, of course, “Part I” in the title (Saracevic, 1976). [A substantively similar article was published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science (Saracevic, 1975)]. I did not plan then to have another related review 30 years later—but things happen. The 1976 work “attempted to trace the evolution of thinking on relevance, a key notion in information science, [and] to provide a framework within which the widely dissonant ideas on relevance might be interpreted and related to one another” (ibid.: 338).

We discuss results from recent relevance research with implications for information professionals. Our studies show that beyond the usual concern with high relevance and non‐relevance judgements, that partially relevant judgements by users are important. We call for the adoption of a more complex view of human relevance judgements in the education and practice of information professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to identify distinguishing term characteristics from among the information of term appearance situations (tas) residing in the relevant/irrelevant documents retrieved for use. Terms with specific characteristics could be used in the distinguishing of user profiles, documents, pages or concepts to assist in information retrieval.

First, a method to apply the potential term characteristics in the distinguishing of user profiles in the information retrieval environment is designed. Then, an information retrieval system is developed to demonstrate the realisation and sustain the study of the method. Formal tests are conducted to examine the distinguishing capability of the potential term characteristics proposed in the method.

The results of the tests show that the potential term characteristics proposed in this study are successfully applied in the distinguishing of user profiles in the information retrieval environment.

Identification of distinguishing term characteristics would expand the ground for the IR community in the design of feature‐extraction algorithms or systems that try to cull information from structured or unstructured documents.