Search results

11 – 20 of over 140000
Article
Publication date: 20 June 2008

Nadjla Hariri

One of the relevance feedback techniques used in search engines is providing a link to similar documents for each retrieved document in a results page. The purpose of this paper…

Abstract

Purpose

One of the relevance feedback techniques used in search engines is providing a link to similar documents for each retrieved document in a results page. The purpose of this paper is to assess whether the “similar pages” relevance feedback feature of Google is truly effective in retrieving documents relevant to the information needs of users.

Design/methodology/approach

The effectiveness of the “similar pages” feature of Google was investigated using 30 paired searches conducted by 30 users with real information needs. The precision ratio of the results of the initial searches and of the searches conducted by clicking the “similar pages” links of the four most relevant results of each initial search were compared. The time spent and the overlapped results of the two kinds of searches were also compared.

Findings

The mean values for precision of and time spent on the “similar pages” searches were significantly less than those for the initial searches. Although, the number of overlapping documents in the “similar pages” searches was higher than that for the initial searches, the difference was not statistically significant.

Practical implications

The findings of this research would be useful for search engine designers as well as the numerous users of common search engines, especially Google, to decide if “similar pages” features truly enhance the quality of information retrieval on the web.

Originality/value

The experimental evidence provided in this paper relates to system design of information retrieval systems on the web.

Details

Online Information Review, vol. 32 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1468-4527

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 December 2003

Jin Zhang and Chi Cheung

This paper describes an investigation of 20 different meta‐search engines. Their features were characterised and classified into six distinct categories based on their…

2021

Abstract

This paper describes an investigation of 20 different meta‐search engines. Their features were characterised and classified into six distinct categories based on their functionality and use. The most used features and unique features were specified and explained in detail. The findings of this study will benefit both meta‐search‐engine developers and ordinary search users.

Details

Online Information Review, vol. 27 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1468-4527

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 3 January 2020

Hany M. Alsalmi

Less attention has been paid to users’ interactions and behavior in studying multilingual search. Although digital library researchers have yet to assess user interaction and…

1059

Abstract

Purpose

Less attention has been paid to users’ interactions and behavior in studying multilingual search. Although digital library researchers have yet to assess user interaction and behavior in multilingual search, they have concurred that there is a need for user studies that document the extent to which information retrieval systems meet multilingual users’ needs and expectations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

This study is composed of five individual cases. The case study participants were Saudi students enrolled either at a large state university or Historically Black College and University located in the same community. Research questions are, what do Saudi Digital Library (SDL) users experience when searching within the SDL in Arabic and English? And what strategies do they use if they fail to find resources? Data collected for this study were via a qualitative method called video-stimulated recall.

Findings

In the Arabic search tasks, participants realized that finding resources is not easy. Participants expressed their concerns about the lack of relevance and accuracy of results returned by the search system, indicating weak trust and confidence in the search system. Whereas in the English search task, participants felt more satisfied and confident in their ability to trust the results returned from the search system. Participants expressed their satisfaction in the search experience as it provided them with accurate and varying resources. The participants faced difficulties finding Arabic resources than English resources in the SDL.

Originality/value

This study is considered one of the earliest works in studying the information-seeking behavior of multilingual digital libraries in the Arabic language. The value of this study arises as being the first study to investigate and report the information-seeking behavior of SDL users.

Article
Publication date: 26 April 2019

Jacqueline Sachse

Web search is more and more moving into mobile contexts. However, screen size of mobile devices is limited and search engine result pages face a trade-off between offering…

Abstract

Purpose

Web search is more and more moving into mobile contexts. However, screen size of mobile devices is limited and search engine result pages face a trade-off between offering informative snippets and optimal use of space. One factor clearly influencing this trade-off is snippet length. The purpose of this paper is to find out what snippet size to use in mobile web search.

Design/methodology/approach

For this purpose, an eye-tracking experiment was conducted showing participants search interfaces with snippets of one, three or five lines on a mobile device to analyze 17 dependent variables. In total, 31 participants took part in the study. Each of the participants solved informational and navigational tasks.

Findings

Results indicate a strong influence of page fold on scrolling behavior and attention distribution across search results. Regardless of query type, short snippets seem to provide too little information about the result, so that search performance and subjective measures are negatively affected. Long snippets of five lines lead to better performance than medium snippets for navigational queries, but to worse performance for informational queries.

Originality/value

Although space in mobile search is limited, this study shows that longer snippets improve usability and user experience. It further emphasizes that page fold plays a stronger role in mobile than in desktop search for attention distribution.

Details

Aslib Journal of Information Management, vol. 71 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2050-3806

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 8 May 2017

Christiane Behnert and Dirk Lewandowski

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to apply traditional information retrieval (IR) evaluation methods based on standards from the Text REtrieval Conference and web…

2024

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to apply traditional information retrieval (IR) evaluation methods based on standards from the Text REtrieval Conference and web search evaluation to all types of modern library information systems (LISs) including online public access catalogues, discovery systems, and digital libraries that provide web search features to gather information from heterogeneous sources.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors apply conventional procedures from IR evaluation to the LIS context considering the specific characteristics of modern library materials.

Findings

The authors introduce a framework consisting of five parts: search queries, search results, assessors, testing, and data analysis. The authors show how to deal with comparability problems resulting from diverse document types, e.g., electronic articles vs printed monographs and what issues need to be considered for retrieval tests in the library context.

Practical implications

The framework can be used as a guideline for conducting retrieval effectiveness studies in the library context.

Originality/value

Although a considerable amount of research has been done on IR evaluation, and standards for conducting retrieval effectiveness studies do exist, to the authors’ knowledge this is the first attempt to provide a systematic framework for evaluating the retrieval effectiveness of twenty-first-century LISs. The authors demonstrate which issues must be considered and what decisions must be made by researchers prior to a retrieval test.

Article
Publication date: 9 August 2011

Nadjla Hariri

The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of relevance ranking on Google by comparing the system's assessment of relevance with the users' views. The…

3627

Abstract

Purpose

The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of relevance ranking on Google by comparing the system's assessment of relevance with the users' views. The research aims to find out whether the presumably objective relevance ranking of Google based on the PageRank and some other factors in fact matches users' subjective judgments of relevance.

Design/methodology/approach

This research investigated the relevance ranking of Google's retrieved results using 34 searches conducted by users in real search sessions. The results pages 1‐4 (i.e. the first 40 results) were examined by the users to identify relevant documents. Based on these data the frequency of relevant documents according to the appearance order of retrieved documents in the first four results pages was calculated. The four results pages were also compared in terms of precision.

Findings

In 50 per cent and 47.06 per cent of the searches the documents ranked 5th and 1st, (i.e. from the first pages of the retrieved results) respectively, were most relevant according to the users' viewpoints. Yet even in the fourth results pages there were three documents that were judged most relevant by the users in more than 40 per cent of the searches. There were no significant differences between the precision of the four results pages except between pages 1 and 3.

Practical implications

The results will help users of search engines, especially Google, to decide how many pages of the retrieved results to examine.

Originality/value

Search engine design will benefit from the results of this study as it experimentally evaluates the effectiveness of Google's relevance ranking.

Details

Online Information Review, vol. 35 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1468-4527

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 26 July 2011

Baojun Ma, Qiang Wei and Guoqing Chen

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for describing and evaluating the representativeness of a small set of search results extracted from the original results: this…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for describing and evaluating the representativeness of a small set of search results extracted from the original results: this is deemed desirable in information retrieval in enterprise information systems.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper proposes a combined measure, namely RFβ, to evaluate the extracted small set in terms of the notions of coverage and redundancy. Data experiments were conducted on three different extraction strategies to evaluate the representativeness, i.e. coverage and redundancy.

Findings

Both from intuitive and experimental perspectives, the proposed coverage measure, redundancy measure and RFβ measure could effectively evaluate the representativeness.

Research limitations/implications

The search results, e.g. in the form of documents and texts, are modeled using a vector space model and cosine similarity. Semantic models and linguistic models could be further introduced into this research to improve the proposed measures.

Practical implications

With the rapidly growing need for information retrieval in enterprise information systems, the representativeness of search results become more desirable and important for search engine users. The well‐designed representativeness measures will help them achieve satisfactory results.

Originality/value

The originality of the paper lies in the definition of representativeness of a small set of search results extracted from the original results. This focuses on the two aspects of coverage rate and redundancy rate both from intuitive and experimental perspectives.

Details

Journal of Enterprise Information Management, vol. 24 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1741-0398

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 29 November 2011

Francisco J. Lopez‐Pellicer, Aneta J. Florczyk, Rubén Béjar, Pedro R. Muro‐Medrano and F. Javier Zarazaga‐Soria

There is an open discussion in the geographic information community about the use of digital libraries or search engines for the discovery of resources. Some researchers suggest…

Abstract

Purpose

There is an open discussion in the geographic information community about the use of digital libraries or search engines for the discovery of resources. Some researchers suggest that search engines are a feasible alternative for searching geographic web services based on anecdotal evidence. The purpose of this study is to measure the performance of Bing (formerly Microsoft Live Search), Google and Yahoo! in searching standardised XML documents that describe, identify and locate geographic web services.

Design/methodology/approach

The study performed an automated evaluation of three search engines using their application programming interfaces. The queries asked for XML documents describing geographic web services, and documents containing links to those documents. Relevant XML documents linked from the documents found in the search results were also included in the evaluation.

Findings

The study reveals that the discovery of geographic web services in search engines does not require the use of advanced search operators. Data collected suggest that a resource‐oriented search should combine simple queries to search engines with the exploration of the pages linked from the search results. Finally the study identifies Yahoo! as the best performer.

Originality/value

This is the first study that measures and compares the performance of major search engines in the discovery of geographic web services. Previous studies were focused on demonstrating the technical feasibility of the approach. The paper also reveals that some technical advances in search engines could harm resource‐oriented queries.

Article
Publication date: 17 October 2008

Dirk Lewandowski

The purpose of this paper is to compare five major web search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, and Seekport) for their retrieval effectiveness, taking into account not only…

2721

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to compare five major web search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, and Seekport) for their retrieval effectiveness, taking into account not only the results, but also the results descriptions.

Design/methodology/approach

The study uses real‐life queries. Results are made anonymous and are randomized. Results are judged by the persons posing the original queries.

Findings

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.

Research limitations/implications

The study is based on a user model where the user takes into account a certain amount of results rather systematically. This may not be the case in real life.

Practical implications

The paper implies that search engines should focus on relevant descriptions. Searchers are advised to use other search engines in addition to Google.

Originality/value

This is the first major study comparing results and descriptions systematically and proposes new retrieval measures to take into account results descriptions.

Details

Journal of Documentation, vol. 64 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0022-0418

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 26 April 2022

Ash E. Faulkner

This article explores the financial literacy resources patrons can discover and/or access on the webpages of the largest 48 US public libraries in order to assess the strength of…

Abstract

Purpose

This article explores the financial literacy resources patrons can discover and/or access on the webpages of the largest 48 US public libraries in order to assess the strength of public libraries' current support to patrons seeking assistance with personal financial matters.

Design/methodology/approach

The author completed a website analysis of the largest 48 US public libraries, as defined by the four sets of criteria in the American Library Association (ALA) publication. Website analysis was completed via a standardized checklist assessment covering full-site searching, catalog content, the availability of relevant guides and/or workshops, and any other relevant online resources.

Findings

Public libraries provide many resources relevant to patrons searching for personal finance topics, but some of these resources are not ideally highlighted on libraries' websites. Site search tools are generally less efficient than catalog search tools. Only half of the studied libraries have relevant online guides, but all libraries have some relevant online resources.

Originality/value

While there are a number of research articles exploring how public libraries support financial literacy in their communities, there has not yet been an in-depth exploration of how public libraries support this literacy, specifically through the materials highlighted and/or available via their websites. This research addresses this gap in the literature.

Details

Reference Services Review, vol. 50 no. 3/4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0090-7324

Keywords

11 – 20 of over 140000