Ten search engines, Altavista, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos, Magellan, OpenText, WebCrawler. WWWWorm, Yahoo, were evaluated, by means of a questionnaire with 20 items (adding up to a total of 200 questions). The 20 first results for each question were analysed in terms of relevance and values of precision and recall were computed for the resulting 4000 references. The results are also analyzed in terms of the type of question (Boolean or natural language) and topic (specialized vs. general interest). The results showed that Excite, Infoseek and AltaVista performed generally better. The conclusion of this methodological trial was that the method used al10ws the evaluation of the performance of Information Retrieval Systems in the Web. As for the results, web search engines are not very precise but extremely exhaustive.
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