WEB SEARCH

ENGINES

&

THEIR

PERFORMANCEMerve YILMAZ

MGIS 301

08.05.2008

An “information retrieval system” searches the computer system to find

the required information.

The most public, visible form of a search engine

İnformation it searches for can be:› Web pages› İmages› Other types of files

The very first tool leading the web search engines: Archie› Collects the file names and creates an

unindexed database from the collection.› Created by a student of McGill

University,Montreal› The name stands for “archive” without “v”

The first search engine: Wandex. › Created by an MIT student.

One of the first full-text crawler-based search engines: WebCrawler*crawler: something that crawls like a reptile

Another popular search engine: Lycos, first started in Carnegie Mellon.

Then came other search engines:Excite,Altavista,Infoseek…

Yahoo provides directory browsing

How did Google become the most popular among others?

An innovation called “Page Rank” Minimalist interface rather than embedding a web search

engine into a web portal

I. Web CrawlingII. IndexingIII. SearchingWeb Crawling: an automated web

browser follows every link it sees.Indexing:words are extracted from titles,

headings,meta tags*meta tag: <META name=“keywords” content=“stamps,stamp

collecting,stamps for sale”>

Search Target 1: Odysseuss2009.org

Best rating percentage: Yahoo.com

Least #of results: Excite.com

Worst rating percentage: Windows

Live / MSN Search

(search.msn.com) (0%)* Excite.com is actually a meta search

engine and shows results from other search engines.

Best rating percentage among meta engines: Dogpile.com

Worst rating percentage: Apollo7.co.uk (almost 0%)

* The engines that the meta search engines collect results from, change from one meta search engine to another. Therefore their performances change accordingly.

Search query: “Loss of customer goodwill in lot-sizing”, an article by Deniz Aksen

*all results including links to the article, or the pages where article is cited/referred are accepted as “hit”.

• Best rating percentage: Ask.com (found 1st in almost all searches)

• Worst rating percentage: Lycos.com (almost none of the results are hit)

• Best rating percentage among meta engines: Mamma.com

• Worst rating percentage among meta engines: Donbusca.com

* Samples are to show only results of some

searches,there are a total of 480 searches with various keywords for one target search result. The remaining are included in excel sheets in detail.