Internet Search Engines
"On the net, nobody knows where anything is."
- Steward Alsop
(Flynn, 1995: C5)
While there have been noteworthy efforts to enhance precision as well as
recall in searching the World Wide Web for resources, even the more
sophisticated search engines often provide irrelevant or duplicated search
Dodge has concisely summarized the general problems experienced by many
users who search the WWW with one or more of the common search engines:
...[T]he biggest frustrations are finding what
you want, the iffiness in getting there, and the
eternal waiting to arrive (Dodge, 1995: 3).
Due to differences in their overall technical design
and coverage, different search engines will not only display search results
differently, overall search results can differ significantly from search engine to search engine.
To be assured that one has identified all potential resources to satisfy a query, all available search engines
must be used, and one must separately review all, or most, results retrieved by each engine.
While this type of information-seeking behavior may be beneficial for certain
types of searches, for many individuals such searching can easily consume a significant portion of
their effort and time, and not necessarily with fruitful results. Librarians can enhance the precision of
Internet searches, increase relevance and reduce overall 'information overload' by employing
many of the conventions that their profession, and others, have used for
hundreds of years for effective retrieval - information
John Dodge, "The Net harbors some search snags," PC week 12(20): 3 (May 22,
Laurie Flynn, "Making searches easier in the Web's sea of data," New York
Times, C5 (October 2, 1995).
Carol Levin, "I know it's out there somewhere...", PC magazine 14(14): 31