scholarly journals Evaluating the Content and Usability of an Experimental Text Summarization System and Three Web-Based Search Engines

Author(s):  
Andre W. Kushniruk ◽  
Min-Yen Kan ◽  
Kathleen R. McKeown ◽  
Judith L. Klavans ◽  
Vimla Patel

This paper describes the evaluation of a new automated text summarization system, Centrifuser. This system provides information to patients and families relevant to their specific health questions. Centrifuser accepts queries about health conditions, and produces a summary of information from articles retrieved by a standard search engine that is tailored to the user's question. The evaluation involved audio- and video-recording of all subject interactions with the interfaces in situ at a hospital. Subjects, consisting of friends or family of hospitalized patients, were asked to “think aloud” as they interacted with Centrifuser and three commonly used search engines: Google, Yahoo, and About.com . Results of the evaluation show that subjects found Centrifuser's summarization capability useful and easy to understand. In comparing Centrifuser to the three search engines, subjects' ratings varied; however, specific interface features were deemed useful across interfaces. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for engineering Web-based retrieval systems.

Author(s):  
S. Naseehath

Webometric research has fallen into two main categories, namely link analysis and search engine evaluation. Search engines are also used to collect data for link analysis. A set of measurements is proposed for evaluating web search engine performance. Some measurements are adapted from the concepts of recall and precision, which are commonly used in evaluating traditional information retrieval systems. Others are newly developed to evaluate search engine stability, which is unique to web information retrieval systems. Overlapping of search results, annual growth of search results on each search engines, variation of results on search using synonyms are also used to evaluate the relative efficiency of search engines. In this study, the investigator attempts to conduct a webometric study on the topic medical tourism in Kerala using six search engines; these include three general search engines, namely Bing, Google, and Lycos, and three metasearch engines, namely Dogpile, ixquick, and WebCrawler.


2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 58-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad M.S. Steel

While the supply of child pornography through the World Wide Web has been frequently speculated upon, the demand has not adequately been explored. Quantification and qualification of the demand provides forensic examiners a behavioral basis for determining the sophistication of individual seeking child pornography. Additionally, the research assists an examiner in searching for and presenting the evidence of child pornography browsing. The overall search engine demand for child pornography is bounded as being between .19 and .49%, depending on the inclusion of ambiguous phrases, with the top search for child pornography being “lolita bbs”. Unlike peer-to-peer networks, however, the top child pornography related query ranks only as the 198th most popular query overall. The queries on search engines appear to be decreasing as well, and the techniques employed are becoming less reliant direct links to content.


Author(s):  
Fabrizio Sebastiani

The categorization of documents into subject-specific categories is a useful enhancement for large document collections addressed by information retrieval systems, as a user can first browse a category tree in search of the category that best matches her interests and then issue a query for more specific documents “from within the category.” This approach combines two modalities in information seeking that are most popular in Web-based search engines, i.e., category-based site browsing (as exemplified by, e.g., Yahoo™) and keyword-based document querying (as exemplified by, e.g., AltaVista™). Appropriate query expansion tools need to be provided, though, in order to allow the user to incrementally refine her query through further retrieval passes, thus allowing the system to produce a series of subsequent document rankings that hopefully converge to the user’s expected ranking. In this work we propose that automatically generated, category-specific “associative” thesauri be used for such purpose. We discuss a method for their generation and discuss how the thesaurus specific to a given category may usefully be endowed with “gateways” to the thesauri specific to its parent and children categories.


Author(s):  
A. Salman Ayaz ◽  
Jaya A Venkat ◽  
Zameer Gulzar

The information available online is mostly present in an unstructured form and search engines are indispensable tools especially in higher education organizations for obtaining information from the Internet. Various search engines were developed to help learners to retrieve the information but unfortunately, most of the information retrieved is not relevant. The main objective of this research is to provide relevant document links to the learners using a three-layered meta-search architecture. The first layer retrieves information links from the web based on the learner query, which is then fed to the second layer where filtering and clustering of document links are done based on semantics. The third layer, with the help of a reasoner, categorizes information into relevant and irrelevant information links in the repository. The experimental study was conducted on a training data set using web queries related to the domain of sports, entertainment, and academics. The results indicate that the proposed meta-search engine performs well as compared to another stand-alone search engine with better recall.


Author(s):  
Fotis Lazarinis

As the Web population continues to grow, more non-English users will be amassed online. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the methods and the criteria used for evaluating search engines and to propose a model for evaluating the searching effectiveness of Web retrieval systems in non-English queries. The qualities and weaknesses related to the handling of Greek and Italian queries are evaluated based on this method. The fundamental purpose of the methodology is to establish quality measurements on search engine utilization from the perspective of end users. Application of the proposed evaluation methodology aids users to select the most effective search engine and developers to identify some of the modules of their software that need improvements.


2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 196-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jin Zhang ◽  
Xin Cai ◽  
Taowen Le ◽  
Wei Fei ◽  
Feicheng Ma

This article describes how as internet technology continues to change and improve lives and societies worldwide, effective global information management becomes increasingly critical, and effective Internet information retrieval systems become more and more significant in providing Internet users worldwide with accurate and complete information. Search engine evaluation is an important research field as search engines directly determine the quality of information users' Internet searches. Relevance-decrease pattern/model plays an important role in search engine result evaluation. This research studies effective measurement of search results through investigating relevance-decrease patterns of search results from two popular search engines: Google and Bing. The findings can be applied to relevance-evaluation of search results from other information retrieval systems such as OPAC, can help make search engine evaluations more accurate and sound, and can provide global information management personnel with valuable insights.


2021 ◽  
pp. 089443932110068
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Urman ◽  
Mykola Makhortykh ◽  
Roberto Ulloa

We examine how six search engines filter and rank information in relation to the queries on the U.S. 2020 presidential primary elections under the default—that is nonpersonalized—conditions. For that, we utilize an algorithmic auditing methodology that uses virtual agents to conduct large-scale analysis of algorithmic information curation in a controlled environment. Specifically, we look at the text search results for “us elections,” “donald trump,” “joe biden,” “bernie sanders” queries on Google, Baidu, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Yandex, during the 2020 primaries. Our findings indicate substantial differences in the search results between search engines and multiple discrepancies within the results generated for different agents using the same search engine. It highlights that whether users see certain information is decided by chance due to the inherent randomization of search results. We also find that some search engines prioritize different categories of information sources with respect to specific candidates. These observations demonstrate that algorithmic curation of political information can create information inequalities between the search engine users even under nonpersonalized conditions. Such inequalities are particularly troubling considering that search results are highly trusted by the public and can shift the opinions of undecided voters as demonstrated by previous research.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002076402098857
Author(s):  
Massimiliano Aragona ◽  
Maria Cristina Tumiati ◽  
Federica Ferrari ◽  
Sonia Viale ◽  
Gianluca Nicolella ◽  
...  

Background: The effects of Sars-Cov-2 pandemic may increase vulnerability of migrants. Aims: To investigate the effects of the governmental lockdown on the mental health of vulnerable migrants in treatment at an outpatient department. Method: In a telephone survey post-migration living difficulties and psychopathological symptoms were investigated, particularly post-traumatic thoughts and nightmares, anxiety, depression, feelings of tension and irritability, other sleep problems, as well as COVID-19 related fears. Psychopathological changes during the lockdown were detected and rated by clinicians. Rates of treatment discontinuation and reasons why were also recorded. Results: Of 103 eligible patients, 81 answered the phone call and were included in the study. Mental symptoms were frequent but not as severe as expected. About 32% of patients in psychopharmacological treatment and almost 52% of patients in psychotherapy had discontinued treatment. Patients who were globally considered to have worsened if compared to their pre-coronavirus mental health conditions had in fact higher scores on several mental symptoms but mild specific fears about coronavirus issues, similar to those of patients improved or stable. Worsening was significantly associated with unemployment, lack of VISA, and treatment discontinuation. Shifting the way of providing psychotherapy into a web-based modality was significantly more frequent in stable/improved patients. Conclusion: Findings suggest that concrete life problems and treatment discontinuation more than the coronavirus fear, have predominantly affected the mental health conditions of our patients.


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