Usability and Performance Estimation of Information Retrieval Systems
Sanjeev Dhawan · 2013
The Web has significantly changed the behavior and expectations of human being in the areas of information retrieval, knowledge sharing and collaborative working. With the advancement of World Wide Web commonly known as WWW, the world has shrunk down, and it has truly become a magnificent force for the people who are using the facility of WWW for fulfilling their different needs. So in this context, it becomes important to design the information retrieval systems according to their functionalities and concerned application areas. Moreover, by having such design criteria you can easily acquire the information on the Web especially with the help of information retrieval systems (or search engines (SEs)). In the era of Internet, the performance and capabilities of information retrieval systems are important and significant areas for research. Millions of people use SEs every day. The Web has motivated research and development in information retrieval to promote SEs. Various search engines have been developed in order to provide users with an interface that enables them to locate documents containing information that matches their queries efficiently. The traditional SEs are keyword based, which also display irrelevant Web pages. Evaluating these SEs acquires increasing importance especially if it helps to answer the questions concerning their work and the accuracy of the results. This study explored and compared the features of each independently built SEs and Meta SEs to evaluate their performance and search capabilities based on the precision, recall, response time, and ranking. This chapter has been organized into four parts: part I presents the general introduction, objectives and scope of existing Web-based SEs, part II evaluates the general characteristics of some selected SEs and Meta SEs, and part III shows the results of SEs and Meta SEs to discuss the effectiveness of these information retrieval systems.