The purpose of this essay is to perform an evaluation regarding retrieval performance of three web Search engines. The Search engines included are All the Web, Alta Vista and Google. These have been tested using ten queries within different subject areas chosen by the author. The first twenty hits for each question have been analyzed for relevancy. Relevancy is judged on a three-point scale; 0, 0,5 and 1 where 0 goes to irrelevant and inactive or duplicate documents, 0,5 point goes to partially relevant documents and 1 point goes to highly relevant documents.

The theoretical focus in this master is information retrieval (IR), and especially the part of IR that includes interactivity. This reSearch is by some reSearchers called IIR. Our principal aim was to examine if Search engines on the WWW are taking advantage of reSearch results from IIR reSearch. A way to do this is to look at the application of special features, in this case query expansion (QE) and relevance feedback (RF). Both these methods aim for a better matching of documents and the Searchers information need.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how the metadata format Dublin Core is applied within five Swedish Search engines. The objects of the investigation are Rättskällan, studera.nu, Svenska miljönätet, Svesök and the web catalogue of Uppsala University. Dublin Core is a flexible and adjustable format, which can be used in many different ways and in various projects depending on the target groups and objectives of the activity. We compare the differences and similarities between the five Search engines concerning their usage of metadata in general and Dublin Core in particular. The material of the investigation consists of metadata records, which are collected by a robot and examined manually.

This essay is about testing the validity of an article written by Jonas Löwgren, called The use qualities of digital design. The study we have executed is about testing the featured qualities of digital design in the article on two Search systems located in the library of Stockholm University and Södertörn University respectively to see how they are able to be applied on Search systems. To acquire the information for the study, we handed out a written inquire among users of those systems. The result of this quantitative study shows us that many that five of Löwgrens qualities is likely to be present on the systems. Our conclusion is that five of these are appliable on Search systems.

The aim of this thesis was to study librarians approach upon reference questions and available resources and also to find out if there is any connection between the nature of the reference question and the choice of resource. The purpose was also to give a deeper understanding of the reference work. Nine librarians were given ten reference questions and their reference work was tape recorded. The study was completed with seven interviews sent by email. Some of the reflections were translated under the headlines of form, subject, time, language and availability.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate and compare the retrieval effectiveness of two Search engines on the Internet: Svensk Medicin and Google Scholar. Svensk Medicin is a medicine-specific Search engine and Google Scholar specialises in indexing scholarly material. A set of 20 questions in four categories were used to conduct the Searches with the Search engines. Genuine medical information needs were selected from a question collection provided by the television program Fråga doktorn. The relevance of the first 10 retrieved documents was judged by using a binary scale and the measure used was precision.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate new knowledge about how children Search for library material and which strategies they use, and if the latest reSearch gives any answers whether we should adapt systems and services or teach information seeking in a better way. In this thesis knowledge is understood as reSearch publications but also results from projects in library practise, and studies concerning children 6 to 18 years old are included. The method used is a knowledge survey. We have gathered and evaluated documentation from different sources like citation and reference databases within the field of library and information science. The result implicates that there are, both in old and new documentation, three main Search strategies children use in their Search for information in a library context; they browse, they Search in library catalogues and they use some sort of reference service.

This thesis considers the problems associated with Searches in insufficiently geographically tagged data. The thesis was carried out at Booli Search Technologies AB, a company developing a Search engine for the Swedish real estate market.The aim of the thesis is to identify some areas of possible improvements of the company?s existing technical platform, perform a benchmarking among similar services, suggest possible solutions and lastly, build a prototype from one of the suggested solutions.The thesis starts out with defining the problems that the Search engine faces: some areas are not possible to perform Searches on, the users are not presented with the full Search result that they expect, some results are placed incorrectly on the map associated with the Search results and results are also not described with enough geographical information. These problems are due to the fact that the data retrieved at the indexing stage in the company?s information retrieval process are insufficient and incomplete.As a result of a benchmarking process and after discussing the results, severalinteresting solutions were identified.

The purpose of this study is to examine the retrieval performance of three Search engines, specialized in retrieving news articles: News Index, Excite News Search and Ananova. Thirty questions, grouped into three categories – politics, economy and sports, were used and the first twenty documents for each question were examined. The questions used were designed to be as current as possible and efforts were made to perform the Searches with as little time span as possible between each Search engine. The precision of the Search engines was determined for each of the questions as well as for each category and for the combined categories. In measuring precision an average was calculated, intended to favour Search engines that place its relevant documents early in the ranked list.

The web is getting more and more characterized by personalization. Big socialnetworks like Facebook as well as the leading Search engine Google increasingly usepersonalization algorithms to tailor the information that they present to users. All inorder to make the information more relevant and engaging for the end consumer. Howdoes this personalization affect journalists who increasingly Search the web as a partof their journalistic reSearch? In this essay we have looked at the effects thatpersonalization has on the journalists of tomorrow by conducting a survey amongstudents of journalism.

Sufficient and accurate Search support is a crucial factor for successful information Searching on web sites. This thesis evaluates the Search support on the second version of the web site studera.nu with particular focus on how the web site meets up to criteria formulated on the basis of theories from reSearch in information seeking and information Searching. The evaluation is a preliminary investigation that may serve as a basis for a future more comprehensive evaluation. The four major questions for my thesis have been: 1. In which different ways can a user Search? 2.

My work has resulted in an interactive Search engine for plants that can be found at www.plantit.se. In the work process I have Searched for which Search criteria is most important when doing Searches on woodland plants. I have done this by an analysis of existing databases and with an survey where leading plant expertise answered questions about woodland plants. I analyzed three Search pages that are on the internet today Havenet.dk, Backyardgardener.com and Den virtuella floran. I concluded that there are several flaws but also many positive aspects that I have used when developing the interface of my page. The survey resulted in the basis for my Search criteria the answers listed the most important factors when planting woodland plants. From this information I developed a system with five values on every criteria.

This essay explores to what extent the Swedish language version of Google Images meets the usability requirements of average everyday users. Previously published studies on user behaviour and users? interface and Search option preferences define the usability requirements, which are matched against Google Images? actual interface and Search options. The retrieval method of Google Images is also briefly discussed, and users? opinions about Google Images too, as they come across in the previously published user studies.The findings are that Google Images lack some of the things that users ask for, but it still seems to be the most used image Search engine among average internet users and more appreciated than other Search engines.

This paper is a literature study on Search engine optimization (SEO) considering the leader of the Search engine market: Google. There´s an introductory background description of Google and its methods of  crawling the Internet and indexing the web pages, along with a brief review of the famous PageRank algorithm. The purpose of this paper is to describe the major important methods for improved rankings on Google´s result lists. These methods could be categorized as on-page methods tied to the website to be optimized or off-page methods that are external to the website such as link development. Furthermore the most common unethical methods are described, known as ?black hat?, which is the secondary purpose of the text.

A webpage can be perfectly usable but if users are unable to find the webpage it will remain unused. Nine out of ten Swedes use a Search engine and the most popular one is Google, amongst other Search engines. In this report I seek to answer which ranking factors that should be included in an SEO-audit of an existing webpage and also how to optimize a webpage for Search engines. Applying the method heuristic evaluation normally used to discover usability issues in an existing interface, on TT News Agency?s campaign site I found issues having a negative impact on the visibility in Search Engines Page Results.