Measuring the efficiency of search engines: an application of data envelopment analysis

This paper adopted the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to investigat e the efficiency of several search engines. A query search on a search engi ne is modelled as a production process. The input and output vectors are de fined and measured accordingly. We studied seven engines, Alta Vista, Excit e, Hotbot, Lycos, Infoseek, Open Text, and WebCrawler and found that Alta V ista, Excite, Infoseek, and WebCrawler are efficient but the other three ar e not. Possible efficiency improvements are calculated.