Statistical Analysis of Search Engines (Google, Yahoo and Altavista) for Their Search Result

Abstract

 Abstract—The web search engines are used to extract query specific information from this massive pool of WWW. A large number of different search engines are available to the user to satisfy their needs. Every search engine uses its own specific algorithm to rank the list of web pages returned by the search engine for the users query, so that the most relevant page appears first in the list. Users think which search engine should be selected for searching corresponding to any query topic for efficient search. For decision making on the basis of search result users want to know, whether they are significantly different or not. In this regard, a study of three popular different search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo and Altavista) on twenty-four different query topics in terms of the quality of most relevant web page is done. The three parameters of the quality of the most relevant web page taken into consideration are: 'in depth coverage', 'ideation and clarity', and 'number of links of related articles to query topic'. For each query topic, the first web page returned by these three search engines were evaluated and graded by the experts of that specific area. Based on these grades, a table is maintained showing the relative performance of selected three search engines in terms of three parameters of quality of first returned web page and thus comparing the ranking algorithms used by them. We analyzed the result using analysis of variance and F test. By this analysis we found grade for first return page result corresponding to each and every topic through all these three search engines (Google, Yahoo and Altavista) does not vary significantly. Thus they are equivalent. So users can treat these three poular search engines as equivalent search engine for the first return page result on the basis of these three parameters.