[Web4lib] Web Search Engine Quality

[Patricia F Anderson]

Hi, Huiykim,

Nancy Allee and I did something vaguely along these lines some years ago.

Anderson PF, Allee, Nancy. 2000. The Quality Connection: Health 
Information Megasites and Search Engines. In: Guide to Health Care on the 
Internet, Chapter 12: Ensuring the Quality of Health Care Information on 
the Net. Faulkner & Gray, 2000, 159-188.

Basically, for our methodology, we selected four questions -- a simple and 
a complex question at both general public and professional levels. We 
focused on e-health. We then scored the first ten results on the following 
criteria:

  Relevancy Rankings:
1 = relevant results, most relevant listed first
2 = some relevant results, some not, ranked
3 = some relevant results, some not, no ranking
4 = possibly relevant results, must dig to find
5 = mostly irrelevant results, top ranked results not relevant
6 = no hits or no relevant topics on first page
<http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pfa/megasite/>
<http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pfa/megasite/srchcomp.html>

We clicked through to the web site for each link, checked the content on 
that page. What we didn't score was whether or not the links actually 
answered the question asked, since in '99 when we did this, almost none of 
the sites retrieved actually answered the questions. Naturally, things are 
different now.

  -- Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich.edu


On Fri, 6 Jul 2007, huiykim at ucla.edu wrote:

> Do you know of any test instruments (or methodologies) for  measuring the 
> quality of web search engines? Do you know of any study that compares the 
> quality of web search engines?
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