A comparative evaluation of popular search engines on finding Turkish documents for a specific time period

Abstract

This study evaluates the popular search engines, Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask, on finding Turkish documents by comparing their current performances with their performances measured six years ago. Furthermore, the study reveals the current information retrieval effectiveness of the search engines. First of all, the Turkish queries were run on the search engines separately. Each retrieved document was classified and precision ratios were calculated at various cut-off points for each query and engine pair. Afterwards, these ratios were compared with the six years ago ratios for the evaluations. Besides the descriptive statistics, Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis H statistical tests were used in order to find out statistically significant differences. All search engines, except Google, have better performance today. Bing has the most increased performance compared to six years ago. Nowadays: Yahoo has the highest mean precision ratios at various cut-off points; all search engines have their highest mean precision ratios at cut-off point 5; dead links were encountered in Google, Bing, and Ask; and repeated documents were encountered in Google and Yahoo.

Keywords

• information retrieval
• performance evaluation
• search engine
• Turkish