Challenges in web search engines

This article presents a high-level discussion of some problems in information retrieval that are unique to web search engines. The goal is to raise awareness and stimulate research in these areas

How do Cochrane authors conduct web searching to identify studies? Findings from a cross-sectional sample of Cochrane Reviews

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordBACKGROUND: Searching the World Wide Web using search engines and websites can be conducted to identify studies for systematic reviews. When searching to support systematic reviews, the searcher faces challenges in using the basic search interfaces of most search engines and websites. OBJECTIVES: To describe and evaluate current practice of web searching in a cross-sectional sample of Cochrane Reviews. The study also describes the stated aims of web searching, i.e. the identification of published or unpublished studies or both. METHODS: A six-month cross-sectional sample of Cochrane Reviews was identified via the Cochrane Library. Reviews were inspected for detail about web searching. Findings were described and evaluated using a framework of key principles for web searching. RESULTS: 423 Cochrane Reviews published August 2016-January 2017 were identified of which 61 (14%) reported web searching. Web searches were typically simplified versions of the bibliographic database search. Advanced and iterative approaches were not widely used. Google Search and Google Scholar were the most popular search engines. Most reports stated identification of grey literature as their aim. CONCLUSION: Basic web search interfaces necessitate simple searches. However, there is scope to use more diverse search features and techniques and a greater variety of search engines

Hybrid Profiling in Information Retrieval

Abstract-One of the main challenges in search engine quality of service is how to satisfy the needs and the interests of individual users. This raises the fundamental issue of how to identify and select the information that is relevant to a specific user. This concern over generic provision and the lack of search precision have provided the impetus for the research into Web Search personalisation. In this paper a hybrid user profiling system is proposed -a combination of explicit and implicit user profiles for improving the web search effectiveness in terms of precision and recall. The proposed system is content-based and implements the Vector Space Model. Experimental results, supported by significance tests, indicate that the system offers better precision and recall in comparison to traditional search engines

An architecture for a focused trend parallel web crawler with the application of clickstream analysis

The tremendous growth of the Web poses many challenges for all-purpose single-process crawlers including the presence of some irrelevant answers among search results and the coverage and scaling issues regarding the enormous dimension of the World Wide Web. Hence, more enhanced and convincing algorithms are on demand to yield more precise and relevant search results in an appropriate amount of time. Since employing link based Web page importance metrics within a multi-processes crawler bears a considerable communication overhead on the overall system and cannot produce the precise answer set, employing these metrics in search engines is not an absolute solution to identify the best search answer set by the overall search system. Thus considering the employment of a link independent Web page importance metric is required to govern the priority rule within the queue of fetched URLs. The aim of this paper is to propose a modest weighted architecture for a focused structured parallel Web crawler which employs a link independent clickstream based Web page importance metric. The experiments of this metric over the restricted boundary Web zone of our crowded UTM University Web site shows the efficiency of the proposed metric

On the Precision of Search Engines: Results from a Controlled Experiment

Handling the growing amount of digital information is one of the major challenges when dealing with the World Wide Web (WWW). In particular, users crave for an effective and efficient retrieval of needed information. In this context, search engines adopt a key role. Besides conventional search engines such as Google, semantic search engines have emerged as an alternative approach in recent years. The quality of search results delivered by search engines is in influenced by many criteria. This paper picks up one specific issue, the precision, and investigates and compares the precision of current both conventional (i.e., non-semantic) and semantic search engines based on a controlled experiment with 77 participants. Specifically, Google, AltaVista, MetaGer, Hakia, Kngine, and WolframAlpha are investigated and compared

Workshop on web information seeking and interaction

The World Wide Web has provided access to a diverse range of information sources and systems. People engaging with this rich network of information may need to interact with different technologies, interfaces, and information providers in the course of a single search task. These systems may offer different interaction affordances and require users to adapt their informationseeking strategies. Not only is this challenging for users, but it also presents challenges for the designers of interactive systems, who need to make their own system useful and usable to broad user groups. The popularity of Web browsing and Web search engines has given rise to distinct forms of information-seeking behaviour, and new interaction styles, but we do not yet fully understand these or their implications for the development of new systems

Special requirements for comparative evaluation of web search engines

ABSTRACT: Performance evaluation of classical information retrieval systems usually aims to assess the ability of these systems to find documents considered relevant to a certain search query based on a specific evaluation criteria. This approach, however, is not suitable to adequately evaluate some information retrieval applications such as web search engines. The web special characteristics make information retrieval tasks and the evaluation of search engines on the web face multiple challenges. Different web-specific, user-specific and language-specific requirements should be considered when designing and performing evaluation tests on operational web search engines. This paper discusses the special requirements for comprehensive comparative evaluation of different web search engines and highlights some languagespecific considerations for evaluation in Arabic language