Search engines on the World Wide Web and information retrieval from the Internet: A review and evaluation

The World Wide Web's search engines are the main tools for indexing and retrieval of Internet resources today. Comparison and evaluation of their performance is of great importance for system developers and information professionals, as well as end-users, for the improvement and development of better tools. The paper describes categories and special features of Web-based databases and compares them with traditional databases. It then presents a review of the literature on the testing and evaluation of Web-based search engines. Different methodologies and measures used in previous studies are described and their findings are summarised. The paper presents some evaluative comments on previous studies and suggests areas for future investigation, particularly evaluation of Web-based search engines from the end-user's perspective.