A COMPARATIVE-STUDY OF WEB SEARCH SERVICE PERFORMANCE

Web-based searched services are playing increasingly important roles i n helping people use network resources. An investigation of the curren t state of search services was conducted by comparing three popular We b-based search services: InfoSeek, Lycos, and OpenText. A taxonomy of service features was first created to do a descriptive comparison. Sec ondly, a set of five questions were used to conduct searches with the three services. Each service offered some advantage for specific queri es although Lycos and OpenText showed better results for the different precision metrics used in this limited study. There was a surprisingl y tow level of result overlap among the three services. None of the se rvices provide good output control for users. Recommendations for impr ovements in display, indexing, and updating are made.