Search Engine Performance Comparisons - Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Agent Technology, and Collaborative Applications - page 148

Chapter VIII
Search Engine Performance
Comparisons
Xiannong Meng
Bucknell University, USA
Song Xing
California State University—Los Angeles, USA
aBstract
This chapter reports the results of a project attempting to assess the performance of a few major search
engines from various perspectives. The search engines involved in the study include the Microsoft Search
Engine (MSE) when it was in its beta test stage, AllTheWeb, and Yahoo. In a few comparisons, other
search engines such as Google, Vivisimo are also included. The study collects statistics such as the av-
erage user response time, average process time for a query reported by MSE, as well as the number of
pages relevant to a query reported by all search engines involved. The project also studies the quality
of search results generated by MSE and other search engines using RankPower as the metric. We found
MSE performs well in speed and diversity of the query results, while weaker in other statistics, compared
to some other leading search engines. The contribution of this chapter is to review the performance
evaluation techniques for search engines and use different measures to assess and compare the quality
of different search engines, especially MSE.
introduction
Search engines, since their inception in the early to mid-1990, have gone through many stages of devel-
opment. Early search engines were derived from the work of two different, but related fronts. One is to
retrieve, organize, and make searchable the widely available, loosely formatted HTML documents over
the Web. The other is then-existing information access tools such as Archie (Emtage, 1992), Gopher
(Anklesaria et.al . 1993), and WAIS (Kahle, 1991) (Wide Area Information Servers). Archie collects