Effectiveness Of Search Engines

Measuring the information retrieval effectiveness of World Wide Web search engines is costly because of human relevance judgments 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. In this study we introduce 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 our method provides results consistent with human-based evaluations. It is shown that the observed consistencies are statistically significant. This indicates that the new method can be successfully used in the evaluation of Web search engines.

Search engines have to major problems. On the one hand they can not keep up to date with the rapid growth of the Internet and on the other hand they often present the user a massive amount of documents from which many are not matching the user's query.

Everything we have discussed can make one's site more visible to Internet search engines, if correctly implemented. Unfortunately, it can also be used dishonestly. Many people out there have figured out how to publicize their web sites on the Internet, and have no qualms about misleading search engines in order to generate more hits on their web sites. Search engines web site editors work very hard to weed out these abusers, because they make it very hard for well-intentioned web surfers to find relevant information. The growing tendency of search engine sites to move to a hybridized service is a direct attempt to thwart search engine misleaders.

The future of availability of information on the Internet is uncertain, but speculations can be made about future effectiveness of search engines. Everyday hundreds of new web pages are made available on the Internet. With competition for the attention of Internet users growing, anything we can do to make our pages more visible will give us a market edge. We as businesspeople, living in a consumer-oriented society, can only hope to make the availability of our services as easily accessible to the individual user as possible. By knowing how search engines work and including information in our web pages that identifies the content within, we can only help the world find what it is looking for, and further the exchange of free and accurate information on the Internet.