Impact of Meta Search Engines on Information Retrieval Effectiveness: A Case Study
M. Nagaraju, Trivikram Mulukutla · 2013
Abstract: WWW is a warehouse with millions of websites, billions of web pages and tons of data, and is growing exponentially by the order of the day. It is almost impossible to access right content for which user is looking for in this ocean of information, unless he/she knows the exact location or URL. Here web search becomes a key technology and one of the important purposes of the web. This is where the role of a search engine becomes meaningful. Meta search engines extract some thousands of documents from different search engines, filter them as per the user requirement and display them. Selecting a right Meta Search Engine among plenty of available search engines is a very big challenge. This is because, not all the search engines produce documents which are most relevant to the user query. Keeping this point in view, in this paper we have consider Zapmeta, Google, Yahoo and Search from the top most Meta search engines list made a case study based investigation to identify how Meta search engines selection shows a greater impact on the information retrieval effectiveness. The results showed that the precision of Yahoo was high for simple one-word queries (9.75) and Search had comparatively high precision for simple multi-word queries (9.46).