The purpose of this thesis is to analyse studies that evaluate Web Search engines. This is done in four categories; the researchers? purpose, the evaluation measurements, the relevance, and the time aspect. Our method is based on a text analysis in which we use the direction of analysis of the content of sixteen evaluation experiments. Our results indicate fundamental differences in the way the researchers are tackling the problem of evaluation of Web Search engines.

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.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate three web-based Search engines and compare the 10 first retrieved documents. We used the Search engines Google, Yahoo! and Exalead. The evaluation is based upon 20 topics with strong polarized opinions and these have been derived from Swedish media and every day life. From these topics we have constructed the 20 queries used for searching. The 10 first documents are each placed in four different categories, For, Against, Neutral or Irrelevant.

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.

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.

The purpose of this masters thesis is to evaluate the retrieval effectiveness of three different Search engines on the Internet: Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search. We have constructed 25 topics and queries with varying contents, in order to test the width of the Search engines as much as possible. In every search we have evaluated the first 20 hits in each of the Search engines. The measures we have used are precision and cumulated gain. Precision is based on a binary scale and cumulated gain is calculated by means of a non-binary relevance scale.

This thesis was built on a practical work for LM Ericsson Data AB and deals with how toexamine an information need for a limited department within the corporation using aqualitative interview method.The thesis deals with how to search for requested information on the Internet and the WorldWide Web (WWW). It contains a model and a method for evaluation of Search engines onthe World Wide Web, and 16 Search engines which primarily indexes the World Wide Webare being evaluated..

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate three Search engines with regard to retrieval effectiveness of information specific to Swedish users. Coverage and the precision in result descriptions are also examined. The three selected Search engines are Google, MSN Search and Svesök. 30 queries were tested against the Search engines and the first 20 result descriptions and results were judged for relevancy. Relevancy was judged by a binary scale.

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.

This thesis is focusing on how global and local Search engines retrieve information from the local domain. The three Search engines tested are the global Search engines Yahoo, Ask.com and the local search engine Web Wombat. The questions we examined were: which search engine has the best retrieval effectiveness? Could there be other reasons than retrieval effectiveness, to choosing a local search engine?For our test we constructed 20 questions related to Australia.We chose to divide the questions into topics like nature, sports and culture. For all questions we evaluated the relevance of the first 20 hits.

This thesis examines the retrieval effectiveness of two Web Search engines. The two Search engines are chosen to represent two different types Google as a broad general search engine and Dogpile as a broad general metasearcher. Twenty queries have been used and the first twenty hits for each query were evaluated for relevance. The queries were invented by the authors, based upon their interests and information needs. They were expressed in a general manner, by using one or several keywords, in accordance with the simple search mode available for each search engine.

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 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.

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 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.