Thaty, Rajendra Kumar; Mukherjee, Sukhendu(INFLIBNET Centre, February NaN, 2003)
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Abstract:
World Wide Web (WWW or the Web) is perhaps the second most widely used application after electronic mail. The publicity and
popularity WWW has gained is so great that many people equate WWW with the Internet. It has been attracting large number of users
as well as information providers due to its user-friendly interface and hypermedia features. The size of WWW is not only huge it also
has been increasing at a mind-boggling rate making it extremely difficult to retrieve information from it. In order to overcome this
difficulty a large number of companies and institutions have developed various search aids such as catalogs, indexes, directories, and
search engines for information retrieval. However, the huge number of these search aids and the differences in the search features used
by them have confounded users. Are these web search engines equally good or do they differ greatly? Is it a fact that a particular
search engine is good for one particular subject field and not so good for another? How do they differ from one another in
performance? Is there a single Web search engine that out-performs all others in information retrieval? The current study attempts to
seek answers to some of these questions.