Search engines’ responses to several search feature selections

The authors of this paper investigated the impact of the advanced search features of three common search engines on retrieval result performance: Yahoo, Google, and Live Search. The authors analyzed 240 search queries with different information need emphases to determine retrieval effectiveness differences among regular search, title search, exact phrase search, and PDF file format restriction search. A one-way ANOVA method and regression analysis method were used for the study. It was found that the PDF file format restriction search achieved the best retrieval performance among Yahoo, Google and Live Search. The regular search achieved the best web page ranking performance among Yahoo, Google, and Live Search. The findings of this study can be used to assist users in formulating an appropriate search strategy to improve search effectiveness, and to shed light on how search engines react to different types of search features in terms of retrieval effectiveness.