Soft Computing Evaluation Logic

4.7Evaluation and Comparison of Search Engines

Search engines (SE) were introduced in 1993, and the first attempts to develop techniques for their evaluation were published in 1996 [CHU96]. During the period from 1996 to 2006, search technology made a significant progress [BRI98, BAE99, SPA97, CHA03, HAW06] and search engines became the most influential web tools. Table 4.7.1 presents a survey of major search engines available in 2006 [DUJ06c, BAI07] and 10 years later, in 2016. Some of the presented engines use proprietary search technology (PST), some of them are meta search engines that distill and aggregate results of multiple PST search engines, and some of them offer specialized search services using a selected PST provider.

Table 4.7.1 A survey of search engines 2006–2016.

General search services are accessible through all web browsers (e.g., Chrome, IE, etc.) and are also offered by various Internet service providers (e.g., AOL). According to survey reported by searchenginewatch.com in July 2006, out of the 5.6 billion searches placed in that month, the leading GYM trio (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) handled more than 80% of the total traffic, with Google taking a leading 49.2% (see [BAE99] for a very different distribution in 1998, and [RAT16] where the worldwide market share in 2016 is Google 72.48%, Bing 10.39%, Yahoo 7.78% and Ask 0.22%). A ranking of search engines ...