A comparative analysis of the search feature effectiveness of the major English and Chinese search engines

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this paper to investigate the effectiveness of selected search features in the major English and Chinese search engines and compare the search engines' retrieval effectiveness. Design/approach/methodology -The search engines Google, Google China, and Baidu were selected for this study. Common search features such as title search, basic search, exact phrase search, PDF search, and URL search, were identified and used. Search results from using the five features in the search engines were collected and compared. One-way ANOVA and regression analysis were used to compare the retrieval effectiveness of the search engines. Findings -It was found that Google achieved the best retrieval performance with all five search features among the three search engines. Moreover Google achieved the best webpage ranking performance. Practical implications -The findings of this study improve the understanding of English and Chinese search engines and the differences between them in terms of search features, and can be used to assist users in choosing appropriate and effective search strategies when they search for information on the internet. Originality/value -The original contributions of this paper are that the Chinese and English search engines in both languages are compared for retrieval effectiveness. Five search features were evaluated, compared, and analysed in the two different language environments by using the discounted cumulative gain method.

A Comparative Evaluation of Search Engines on Finding Specific Domain Information on the Web

“…Most of them tested the effectiveness by using general topic query. Among the comparisons ever done, were against the keyword-based search engines and the semantic-based search engines [3][4]; commercial search engines against dedicated search engines [5] and English search engines against other language search engines [6][7]. Some researcher also did compare the effectiveness using short queries and long queries [8]; natural language queries [9], reformulated queries [10] and many more.…”

“…Many comparative studies reported that Google always outperform other search engines [7,11]. As an example result from Deka's evaluation [20] reported that Google has the highest rate of performance, followed by Yahoo and Live, Ask and AOL search engines.…”

Evaluating the effectiveness of Google, Parsijoo, Rismoon, and Yooz to retrieve Persian documents

“…According to the results reported by Tawileh et al (2010), Google's effectiveness was higher than Arabic search engines. In addition, the results of Zhang et al (2013) (2013) indicated that Google's effectiveness was higher than Baidu's. In the light of the present research's findings and some previous studies such as Griesbaum and Spink (2004), Demirci et al (2007), Luyt et al (2009), Deka and Lahkar (2010), and Garoufallou (2012), it can be said that Google performs better.…”

“…Zhang et al (2013) compared the effectiveness of Google and Baidu search engines. They designed 20 search tasks focusing on the four subject domains, including medicine and health, culture and education, information and technology, and business and economy, with five search tasks assigned for each one.…”

Factiva and Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

“…Specifically, the authors discovered that the simple search string required considerable manipulation in syntax to produce similar yields among the three interfaces. Other factors to consider in evaluating databases include access to full-text articles and overall ease of use (Ewald, 2004;Mansourian, 2008), user performance, how effectively the search tool retrieves citations, the relevance of those retrievals (Zhang et al, 2013), the search strategy, and the topic of the search (Mansourian, 2008). One overarching conclusion from these studies is not surprising: paid databases function differently than databases that are freely available, and it is important that users familiarize themselves with the idiosyncrasies of the databases they select for research purposes.…”