ESTIMATING THE RECALL PERFORMANCE OF WEB SEARCH ENGINES

This paper reports a comparison of the retrieval effectiveness of the Alta Vista, Excite and Lycos Web search engines. A method is described for comparing the recall of the three sets of searches, despite the f act that they are carried out on non-identical sets of Web pages. It i s thus possible, unlike previous comparative studies of Web search eng ines, to consider both recall and precision when evaluating the effect iveness of search engines.