Estimating the Prominence of AHP in a Selected Internet Search Engine

Abstract

Internet has become an instant source of informatio n for almost anyone. By viewing the results of sear ch terms displayed by an Internet Search Engine (ISE), a person may decide his next course of action whether to continue using the Internet, abort or to combine it with other sources of information. The results produced by an ISE can be regarded as an in dex of relative availability of references. Given a list of suitable search terms, a user will firstly have to decide on the ISE to be used. Due to huge potent ial references available for given search terms the use r has to create heuristics to choose the entries sh own on the computer screen. As there are varying breadths and depths of information revealed by various Inter net Search Engines (ISE’s), this paper will not attempt to make a comparison among ISE’s, rather will focu s only on a particular search engine and ascertain th e results it produces given a list of search terms. Google is chosen as a proxy, being one of the most popular ISE’s. By confining to only a search engine, the s tudy affords to control variability among ISE’s should m ultiple ISE’s be used. With the search engine place d under control, it is easy to achieve the primary ob jective of the study, i.e., to ascertain availabili ty of relative breadth of sub-themes of Analytic Hierarch y Process (AHP) in Google. It is natural for user, especially researcher to be concerned with number, quantity. If there is seemingly abundant literature , one would be motivated to pursue research along the the me or sub-theme. In this study, the strength of presence of a sub-theme is measured by using two measures: (i) result of a sub-theme of AHP over the sub-theme itself, and (ii) result of the sub-theme over the total results generated for all of the thi rty six sub-themes used in the search. This study controlle d biasness in specifying the sub-themes of AHP by adopting the sub-themes or search terms specified b y the 2013 AHP conference organizers. This decision helps make the study efficient without with it has to distill the sub-themes by surveying the AHP literature. The data for analysis was gathered by s urfing Google on 26 Feb 2013 8.55 p.m. - 9.26 p.m. Peninsular Malaysian time. The search results were computed to generate two types of ratios specified earlier. A composite index was created using the re sulting two types of ratios which are used to class ify the efficiency, hence dominance of the original res ults (hits). Kendall’s correlation produced statist ically significant correlations between the composite inde x and Rank of AHP specific and area results. Using indices greater than 1.000 as the base, 6 AHP specific areas occupy the top positions with ratios ranging from 19.341 to 61.574; 15 AHP specific areas occupy the second top positions with ratios ranging from 1.119 to 9.602, and 14 AHP specific areas occupy the third and last position with indi ces below 1.000 ranging from 0.050 to 0.894. The paper includes dis cussion, implications, limitations, conclusions and suggestions for further research.