Search Engine Performance Comparisons - Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Agent Technology, and Collaborative Applications - page 159

The last set of statistics to be reported here is the measured response time from three of the five
search engines, namely, AlltheWeb, MSE, and Yahoo!. In this collection of statistics, the actual wall-
clock timing between the time when the query is sent and the time when the return page is received is
recorded and averaged over a number of runs. In our client programs, we used the following logic to
collect data for each of the three aforementioned search engines.

Connect to the search engine;
Starttimingforirstpageresponse;
Send the query;
Readtheirstpageresponse;
Stoptimingforirstpageresponse;
Start timing for rest of the pages;
Loop
Send the query;
Read next page response;
End loop
Stop timing for rest of the pages.

In order to study the perceived user response time, the data is collected from two places, a desk-
top computer on the campus of California State University at Los Angeles from the west coast, and a
desk-top computer on the campus of Bucknell University from the east coast. As we will see, the data
presents some interesting results. The data collected from Bucknell is shown in Table 6, the ones col-
lected from Cal State LA is shown in Table 7. Note that in both tables, the information from AlltheWeb
is used instead of that of Google for the reasons explained in section Experiment Methods.

Table 6. Wall-clock time for a return page seen from Bucknell University (in milli-seconds)

Search Engine AlltheWeb MSE Yahoo

Avg. Page 1 695 607 720

Std. Dev. Page 1 253 316 320

Avg. Pages 2-5 519 354 533

Std. Dev. Pages 2-5 157 54 252

Avg. Overall 606 480 627

Table 7. Wall-.clock time for a return page seen from Cal. State at Los Angeles (in milli-seconds)

Search Engine AlltheWeb MSE Yahoo

Avg. Page 1 733 428 619

Std. Dev. Page 1 330 170 272

Avg. Pages 2-5 539 282 527

Std. Dev. Pages 2-5 109 116 200

Avg. Overall 636 355 573