MALAYSIAN WEB SEARCH ENGINES: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Abstract

The explosive growth of the Internet has rendered the World Wide Web as the primary tool for information retrieval today. The Web has stimulated research and development in information retrieval, and fostered Web search engines. Various Web search engines have been developed in order to provide users with an interface that enables them to locate documents containing information that matches their interests. Evaluating these Web search engines acquires increasing importance especially if it helps to answer questions concerning both the way they work and the accuracy of the results they provide. Though many comparative search engine studies have been conducted and published, no evaluation has been done on Malaysian Web search engines. This study explored and compared the features of each independently built Malaysian Web search engines as well as evaluated their performance and search capabilities. Google served as the benchmark engine for this study. This study applied two co-related methodologies namely Information Retrieval Evaluation Methodology and common features comparison. Malaysia Directory appears to be the best Malaysian Web search engine in term of feature presentation but failed badly in term of retrieval performance; whereas Malaysia Central managed to score highest for mean precision but failed to excel in term of feature presentation.