SEARCH ENGINES ON THE WORLD-WIDE-WEB AND INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL FROM THE INTERNET - A REVIEW AND EVALUATION

The World Wide Web's search engines are the main tools for indexing an d retrieval of Internet resources today. Comparison and evaluation of their performance is of great importance for system developers and inf ormation professionals, as well as end-users, for the improvement and development of better tools. The paper describes categories and specia l features of Web-based databases and compares them with traditional d atabases. It then presents a review of the literature on the testing a nd evaluation of Web-based search engines. Different methodologies and measures used in previous studies are described and their findings ar e summarised. The paper presents some evaluative comments on previous studies and suggests areas for future investigation, particularly eval uation of Web-based search engines from the end-user's perspective.