Retrieval performance of select search engines in the field of physical sciences

The study aims to provide a systematic evaluation of the search engines on the basis of two information retrieval parameters (precision and relative recall) with reference to physical sciences. It employed ‘Web of Science’ to identify data (one to three word queries) of highly ranked authors who have contributed to the discipline of physical sciences. The three English language search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) were selected on the basis of ranking of ‘Alexa’ (Actionable Analytics for the Web). The study reveals that in all (one, two and three word) queries ‘Google’ obtained highest precision and relative recall followed by ‘Yahoo’ and ‘Bing’. It further shows that ‘Google’ and ‘Yahoo’ achieve the highest ‘precision’ and ‘relative recall’ due to their wide coverage. Bing once prominent one, however lags behind in retrieval effectiveness

Survey and evaluation of query intent detection methods

Second ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, Barcelona (Spain)User interactions with search engines reveal three main underlying intents, namely navigational, informational, and transactional. By providing more accurate results depending on such query intents the performance of search engines can be greatly improved. Therefore, query classification has been an active research topic for the last years. However, while query topic classification has deserved a specific bakeoff, no evaluation campaign has been devoted to the study of automatic query intent detection. In this paper some of the available query intent detection techniques are reviewed, an evaluation framework is proposed, and it is used to compare those methods in order to shed light on their relative performance and drawbacks. As it will be shown, manually prepared gold-standard files are much needed, and traditional pooling is not the most feasible evaluation method. In addition to this, future lines of work in both query intent detection and its evaluation are propose