Dealing with Complex Queries on Environment: A Comparison of The Performances of WWW Search Engines

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.