Search Engine Performance Comparisons

Abstract

This chapter reports the results of a project attempting to assess the performance of a few major search engines from various perspectives. The search engines involved in the study include the Microsoft Search Engine (MSE) when it was in its beta test stage, AllTheWeb, and Yahoo. In a few comparisons, other search engines such as Google, Vivisimo are also included. The study collects statistics such as the average user response time, average process time for a query reported by MSE, as well as the number of pages relevant to a query reported by all search engines involved. The project also studies the quality of search results generated by MSE and other search engines using RankPower as the metric. We found MSE performs well in speed and diversity of the query results, while weaker in other statistics, compared to some other leading search engines. The contribution of this chapter is to review the performance evaluation techniques for search engines and use different measures to assess and compare the quality of different search engines, especially MSE.