Is Google alone sufficient for effective information retrieval?
Introduction
Humans have in all years been looking for method that would in essence reduce their work load. This has led to centuries upon centuries of discoveries as well as inventions that in one way or the other make human existence on earth a little less tiresome. The computer and the internet are among the most recent combination of inventions created by man that seek to lessen humanity’s workload. Despite these great strides made by man, until two decades ago, the gathering of information was a cumbersome activity to humans. This was especially in cases where that particular information was not found in one source.
Enter Google. Google was created in order to create a list of websites relating to a particular topic on one page. This enables users to be able to key in particular words and receive thousands of websites on that particular topic. This has enabled web-users to be able to navigate through thousands of results. For a century or so, Google, that became a technological phenomenon, has been able to successfully dominate the search engine market due to its ability to produce results. In fact Google became so essential that other companies such as Bing came up with similar concepts.
Despite its success, Google has in recent years come under scrutiny as to its effectiveness as a search engine. In fact, the success rate of Google as far as searches are concerned is reflected in a number of researches conducted in as to the quality of available search engines. These studies are carried out according to, among other categories search quality as well as popularity. In fact, as of June this year, studies indicated that while Google was still the most popular search engine, garnering a whopping 66% of the market, yahoo was found to be the most effective in getting users to click through to another website. In fact, research found that the success rate of searches resulting was highest with yahoo at 81%. Google on the other hand came in third with just a 67% success rate. This has brought on the question of whether an individual can use Google alone and be able to experience effective information retrieval (Goh & Foo, 2008, p.21).
General search engine information retrieval
The general duty of any search engine company is to produce the best information retrieval system there is. The search engines need to be evaluated during both the development process as well as when the system is running. Such evaluations are important for them ultimately to improve the quality of search results. Search quality has been able to be classified in four major quality factors (Rowlands et.al, 2008, p.299)..
Index quality
This is the area of quality measurement that focus on the importance that search engine databases play in the retrieval of results that are both relevant and comprehendible. The quality measurements always focus on general web coverage, country bias and the freshness of the information being sought after.
Quality of the results
Here classic retrieval methods are put to test. In this case, what is usually considered is the measure as far as quality is concerned. The quality should be able to satisfy the needs of then user as well as satisfy the unique character of the search engine.
Quality of search features
An adequate set of search features and a sophisticated inquisitor language should be offered and should function reliably for a search engine to be able to satisfy quality search feature.
Search engine usability
Here, the main question is whether the user is able to interact with the search engine in a way that is both efficient as well as effective.
A combination of the four sets of features determines the scale of which any search system, Google included, can be measured to be able to determine the results. Most of these features can be examined either individually or as a set to be able to determine quality results. However, as far as effective information retrieval is concerned the most important feature to examine is search engine quality. The rest of the features while important to the determination of quality can ultimately be derived from the results of the search engine quality.
Google as far as search engine quality is concerned
Search engine quality research, as an area of interest, draws its importance not only from a general interest of information science in the performance of search systems, but also from general society’s wider discussion on search engines. Currently, as indicated, Market figures show that there is a dominance of Google in markets all over the world (Hersh, 2003, p. 76). The main question however comes in when one wants to determine whether Google is really providing good search engine quality or if the company’s popularity is due to its brand name only. If the answer to that is the latter, is there a search engine that is better as far as search information quality is concerned. For if Google is the only search engine that provides quality search results, then it would only be right if users were to exclusively use the search engine. On the other hand, if the quality of searches provided by goggle is of lower standards then it is only fair that the users do not use the engine exclusively as far as effective information retrieval is concerned.
One of the firms that recently did a research on the effectiveness of search engines in the market came to a conclusion of the fact there there is still a problem as far as the effective information retrieval was concerned even in Google’s case. The research firm highlighted that "The share of unsuccessful searches highlights the opportunity for both the search engines and marketers to evaluate the search engine result pages to ensure that searchers are finding relevant information". This indicates that indeed there is a problem and that people cannot solely rely on one search engine to efficiently provide the entire information one seeks but rather that it would be wise to use a couple instead maximizing on the strengths of each (Ellis, 1996, p.43).
Reasons why users prefer Google to other search engines
Apart from the main reasons associated to users’ preference of Google over other search engines other than the brand name, there have been other research reasons that have come to light. Some of these researches touch on the system’s ability to effectively retrieve information. Studies indicate that while other search engines are able to deliver a variety of searches, Google ultimately delivers the largest amount of relevant results. There is nothing more annoying than being presented with a lot of information that is not relevant to one’s subject of inquiry. While Google uses the same search engine as all its competitors, its identification of relevant parts of the document works better than that of its competitors. The down side to this leading advantage is however the fact that most of the many results that the system will presented are more often than not irrelevant results.
Generally, a user does not systematically evaluate the results presented but rather just clicks on a couple of results. Because of the large number of results found by the search engine it is less likely that the user will miss at least one result that is relevant to their search. Therefore it is important to note that while the user is interested in finding as many results on the topic as possible, relevance plays an important role in the search process. Quality will always trump quantity as far as a good search is concerned.
The ranking of the results similarly plays a very important role as far as effective search engines are concerned. It would make absolutely no sense for the most relevant search results to be placed in the middle or at the bottom of the ranking more so in cases where thousands or even millions of results were able to be retrieved.
Result descriptions also play a very important role where search engines are concerned because it is the results description that will influence the users’ judgment. In most cases, relevant descriptions should be able to yield relevant results. Although in some cases, irrelevant descriptions yield relevant results. In such cases, then the search engine has been able to reach very quality levels.
Finally, it is important that the search engine provides diversity of sources. While diversity within the result set may not be enough, it should always be presented on the first result screen in order to give users an overview of different sources that have information on a particular topic. Providing three of four similar sources more so on the front page may create a sense of monotony as far as result finding is concerned. Diversity of sources is relatively simple to measure, as the higher the number of sources presented on the first result screen, the better.
However, diversity of sources does not measure whether the question results cover all aspects of the underlying information need. When aspects are collected in the results collection phase, these aspects can be extracted from the documents found and compared to the former. Thereafter, the number of results a user must view in a certain search engine until all aspects of the topic are displayed can be measured. Even if this appears to be too strict of an approach and it can be argued that users rarely require access to information on all different aspects of a topic, measuring aspects can be a good way of identifying search engines that produce relevant results, but where these results are too similar to each other.
References
Ellis, D. (1996). Progress and problems in information retrieval. London, Library Assoc.
Goh, D., & Foo, S. (2008). Social information retrieval systems: emerging technologies and applications for searching the Web effectively. Hershey, Information Science Reference. http://public.eblib.com/EBLPublic/PublicView.do?ptiID=315017.
Hersh, W. R. (2003). Information retrieval: a health and biomedical perspective. New York [u.a.], Springer.
Rowlands, I., Nicholas, D., Williams, P., Huntington, P., Fieldhouse, M., Gunter, B., ... & Tenopir, C. (2008, July). The Google generation: the information behaviour of the researcher of the future. In Aslib Proceedings (Vol. 60, No. 4, pp. 290-310). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
