Site-Specific versus General Purpose Web Search Engines: A Comparative Evaluation

We can distinguish two types of web search engines: general use ones that index and search all the Web, and site-specific ones that are provided by individual websites for local searching. A comparison of the effectiveness of the two types allows search engine users to choose the right engine and organizations to decide whether they should develop their own search software or purchase the search function as a service. We evaluate the performance of two general purpose search engines and 10 site-specific ones. The criteria we used are precision and relative recall. We entered 20 queries in each website's search engine and evaluated the first 10 links. According to the results, Google is in most cases the most efficient search engine. However, in some cases general purpose search engines do not index the website's content as well as a site-specific engine.