The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to evaluate three general query-based web search engines. The search engines chosen are Google, Yahoo! and Live search. The topics, which where transformed into twenty queries, are based on real users? information needs, taken from an ask-a-question service.

Millions of people are using search engines every day when they are trying to find information on the Internet. The purpose of this report is to find out how people formulate search queries. The result in this report is based on an empirical study which is based on a search log from the Swedish search engine Seek.se.One of the results in this thesis is that nearly all search queries are based on keywords..

The purpose of this paper has been to identify which modern search functions user of Smartphones are using, why just these functions are being used, and how they have affected the way users acquire information. Modern search functions in this paper means searches that are not based on text, i.e. ways to search for information by other means than writing something into a search field. To identify this, two studies were conducted, one with a questionnaire being distributed with the help of Google Docs through social networks, and one with four interviews with users of modern search functions for Smartphones. The study showed that even though 76 % of Smartphone users are aware of at least one modern search function, only 29% uses one on a regular basis.

The focus of the thesis is an information search technique called manual query expansion, which aims to improve the retrieval per-formance in a search system by adding terms to the search query. The study looks at the query expansions done by LIS students, and the eventual beneficial effects by using a search help during the search process. The empirical data have been collected thro-ugh an experiment, with an experiment group as well as a control group. The conclusion is that the students need more education in query expansion in order to be able to use it correctly. There are significant differences between the groups in several aspects, for example in the use of search terms, parentheses, and truncation.

In this thesis, the conditions of using the maintenance method live work at the Swedish TSO, Svenska Kraftnät has been analyzed. The study is limited to only include live work on 220 and 400 kV. The live work method is a type of maintenance that can be done, on lines or stations, even though they are still energized. The purpose of this thesis has been to map the present live work situation at these levels in Sweden. The study is based mostly on interviews with people who have specific field competence with in live work but also with personnel at Svenska Kraftnät.

This report examines the possibility of optimizing troubleshooting log files generated when constructing new Volvo trucks. Errors occur when CAD models are stored and managed by the versioning system PDMLink. By developing a new diagnostic tool, Log Search, the troubleshooting process is automated and thereby streamlines the current manual search..

The purpose of the essay was to discover how homeless persons want to live. Does it matter what it looks like? The method used was a qualitative study including literature and 10 interviews with ten homeless persons, of which seven lived outdoors and three in temporarily residences. The central questions were the following:How do homeless people want to live?In what sort of houses do they want to live and where?How do they look upon their situation and their future?What obstacles can occur if they for example got an apartment to live in?Are there any proposals to solve the problems?Most of them had been living outdoors for five to ten years, perhaps more, and they were worried and sad about their future.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine the retrieval performance of two search engines, Yahoo! News and Sesam, specialized on indexing news articles in Swedish. Thirty search questions were used in this study, divided into three different categories: domestic news, amusement and sport. Precision has been calculated both for the 30 search questions as a total and for the three categories as well. Precision was calculated at every DCV-level and then divided with the number of search questions used, in an attempt to reach an average measure.

In this essay, a search strategy for citation index is studied. The strategy, which is essentially a citation cycle, starts with documents retrieved by a subject search, wherefrom new documents are identified following the network of citations backwards and forwards in time. Based on the theory of polyrepresentation, the strategy exploits overlaps between cognitively different interpretations of the same documents in order to automatically select references seed documents used as a starting point for the forward chaining. The purpose of the investigation is to evaluate the retrieval effectiveness of the search strategy and to find out whether the strategy can be used to expand a subject search with the help of the network of references in order to retrieve new relevant documents. Two questions are formulated: 1a.

The purpose with this essay is to evaluate the retrieval performance between Googles basic search and the advanced search functions. A secondary purpose is to evaluate the differences between the binary relevance scale and a 4- point scale. The basic search is defined as a search with two terms combined with the Boolean operator AND. The advanced search is based on search functions that are adequate to compare to the basic search. They are categorized as AND-searches, OR-searches, AND and OR-searches, exact phrase, and depending on where the terms occur on the page.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how novices set about when they search for information. Marchionini's information-seeking model is the theoretical starting point, which is supplemented by theories of other specialists within the field, such as Chowdhury; Harter; Large, Tedd and Hartley. As method a questionnaire survey was used. The questionnaire was sent to 96 students at IHM Business School in Gothenburg and 57 questionnaires were returned. The results show among other things that the majority of the students used highly interactive search strategies, and they did not plan their search before they carried out the search.

Today, one of the foremost tools used by the library staff is the library catalogue search tools. It has come to our understanding that some library staff are dissatisfied with how the search tools works. The aim of this study is to illuminate the library staff's negative experiences of the search tools, and to present a basis for future discussion and development. To our help we have used a quantitative survey which were sent to library staff that used one of the two largest integrated library systems in Sweden, BOOK-IT and Mikromarc. The questions regarded the library staff's perception of a number of features in the search tools.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the three search engines Web of Science, Google Scholar and MEDLINE in regards of recovery efficiency and the overlap of relevant documents when it comes to information searching for academic purposes. Furthermore, it raises the question whether freely available search engines and licensed search engines are interchangeable with each other. The empirical data in this study were collected through searches conducted in the three search engines Web of Science, Google Scholar and MEDLINE. Twenty search queries were used and the first twenty retrieved documents for each query were examined for relevance using previously designed criteria. The documents were scored by a binary relevancy scale and thereafter a precision value for each search engine was calculated.

This thesis is a case study of the search function on the University of Uppsala?s web site. The search function in this study was chosen since it exists on a large and complex web site and there were apparent lacks in the old version of the search function. The thesis highlights some of the problems that can appear in the development of a search function on a local site. One interesting find is that one of the most difficult issues is organizational and not technical.

EPiServer is a content management system where users can publish information on a website by using a web browser. EPiServer has a built-in search engine that is very simple. Many customers using EPiServer web publishing system is in need of more functionality than is offered by EPiServer's built-in search engine. The purpose of this thesis is to develop additional functionality extends that the built-in search engine in EPiServer. The assignment was also to identify what need to be developed in order to give customers a better  opportunity to help their visitors find the right information on their website.Since this thesis was started in 2005, a number of commercial search engine productsentered  the market and it has become more common for companies to invest inthese products instead of using the simple search engine that's built into EPiServer.These products have many of the features that have been developed in this thesis.Another crucial difference between EPiServer?s built in engine and other products isthe method used to index content.