Ask.com, Web Wombat and Yahoo : A study of two global and one local search engines.

This thesis is focusing on how global and local search engines retrieve information from the local domain. The three search engines tested are the global search engines Yahoo, Ask.com and the local search engine Web Wombat. The questions we examined were: which search engine has the best retrieval effectiveness? Could there be other reasons than retrieval effectiveness, to choosing a local search engine?For our test we constructed 20 questions related to Australia.We chose to divide the questions into topics like nature, sports and culture. For all questions we evaluated the relevance of the first 20 hits. We used the following measures in our test: Jaccard´s index, precision and average precision. We also looked at factors such as duplicates and error pages, because we consider this to be an important aspect to consider, when looking at the relevance of the first 20 hits. The results of our study showed that Yahoo had the best performance for precision. Web Wombat had faulty precision but results from Jaccard´s index revealed that Web Wombat had many unique documents. Web Wombat had the best average precision on one of our questions. In spite of Web Wombats faulty precision, we think that Web Wombat serve a purpose as an alternative to global search engines.Uppsatsnivå: