The performance evaluation of the search engines is one of the most sought-after topics in search engines history. In a recent study pertaining to my research work on the performance evaluation of search engines in retrieving web resources, it has been found that the popularity status of search engines are almost remaining same among the five search engines year over year. The study was conducted on five most popular search engines, i.e. Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask, and AOL. The basic findings of the study was as follows:
In terms of coverage and user statistics GOOGLE is still remaining the most popular search engine on the web followed by YAHOO.
The basic concepts of search strategies and searching processes of all the five search engines is remain same.
All the five search engines followed different indexing method and the relevance ranking system is based on their owned unique algorithms.
There is significant difference of performance among the evaluated search engines. From the overall analysis of the findings of the matrices it was founded that the GOOGLE has statistically higher rate of performance in retrieving web resources as compared with the other four search engines. GOOGLE is followed by YAHOO in terms of measuring the retrieval performance. The other three search engines, i.e. AOL, LIVE, and ASK, have not performed satisfactorily as compared with GOOGLE and YAHOO.
Another conclusion of this evaluation is that, users could, and should, contemplate YAHOO as a real alternative to GOOGLE, especially because both engines were able to answer all the queries with highest mean of relevant hits. Beyond that, YAHOO was found to retrieve the greatest number of hits, less number of bad links, great stability in retrieving relevant hits, and maximum number of unique hits, after the GOOGLE.
Given these findings, we can consider that this study will provide important insight into the effectiveness of five major types of search engines and their support in retrieving relevant internet resources.
The present research tried to achieve results as valid and reliable as possible within the given resources. The available knowledge and evaluation experience was used to consider web-specific retrieval peculiarities and evaluation standards in a sufficient manner. This study has produced key findings that are important for all Web search engine users and researchers, and the Web industry.
