Evaluating Web Search Engines

Journal of “Online Information Review” is going to publish a special issue on “Evaluating Web Search Engines”. The topics include: retrieval effectiveness, reliability of search results, language handling, index sizes and overlap comparisons, query log analysis, user behaviour, results presentation, user surveys, user guidance in the search process, ability of search engines to deal with different query types, index and/or results freshness, diversity of results, search features comparison, influence of search engine optimization (SEO) on results quality.

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Web Search Efficacy

The following paper was published recently: Mansourian, Y. (2008). Web search efficacy: definition and implementation, Aslib Proceedings , Vol. 60, No. 4, pp. 349-363. Abstract: Purpose – This paper aims to report a number of factors that are perceived by web users as influential elements in their search procedure. The paper introduces a new conceptual measure called “web search efficacy” (hereafter WSE) to evaluate the performance of searches mainly based on users' perceptions. Design/methodology/approach – A rich dataset of a wider study was inductively re-explored to identify different categories that are perceived influential by web users on the final outcome of their searches. A selective review of the literature was carried out to discover to what extent previous research supports the findings of the current study. Findings – The analysis of the dataset led to the identification of five categories of influential factors. Within each group different factors have been recognize
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Doctoral Forum in Aberystwyth

I attended a wonderful workshop at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth from 6th to 7th April. I delivered a presentation about my research. It was the third doctoral forum that I have attended during my PhD study. I like this kind of doctoral forums because it provides us with an opportunity to simply talk to other fellow researchers from different universities and learn new things from them. I’ll write more about the workshop in the next entries. I have uploaded some photos that I took in Aberystwyth on my homepage here and here .
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Clusty

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