Critical Analysis of the Most Popular Search Engines (Essay Sample)

Institution
Critical analysis of the most popular search engines
David Shaw
Technology 101
Professor Jones
6 September 2015
Introduction
The expansive growth of the internet has revolutionized information access and also the ways of retrieving such information. Search engines today are the primary tools used to retrieve information from the World Wide Web. In this day and age of the internet, there exist whole lots of possibilities such as information broadcasting and retrieval, digital libraries, electronic commerce, electronic governance and also entertainment. There has been the development of numerous search engines to provide users with interfaces that facilitate the retrieval of information that matches their interests. Despite most of the search engines being popular, finding the relevant information remains one of the most important attributes that the search engines must possess.[Croft Bruce and Donald Metzler. Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice. (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2010).]
Performance of Search Engines
In order to evaluate the significance and performance of a major search engine, there are a few factors that one must consider. Arranged in order, these factors include; relevance, attention, freshness, variety and user friendliness. It is evident that most search engines are capable of generating great results for the most popular queries run by users. However, for them to be great search engines, they must equally be in a position to provide valuable results for the rare queries.
The ability of the search results generated by a particular search engine to fulfill a user’s goal and expectations defines the relevance of the search engine. The more accurate the search results, the more relevant the search engine becomes. Though the measurement of relevance is subjective in a way, one can judge the relevance of a particular search engine by weighting the best answers in the first few results against the results further down. The coverage aspect defines search engine’s index size and crawl-speed. A search engine with a bigger index size and faster crawl-speed has the ability to retrieve more pages with more relevance to each search query.[Rand Fishkin "Comparing Search Engine Performance How Does Cuil Stack Up to Google, Yahoo!, Live & Ask." Moz. July 29, 2008. Accessed September 6, 2015.]
The attribute of results freshness refers to the ability of the search engine to retrieve and display the most current and relevant results as the very first results in the overall list of results displayed. For instance, if a user were to put the keywords "White House”, the search engine should display the most current activities from White House at the time on top of the list of displayed results. At times, a user may feed an ambiguous query to a search engine. Agreeably, the most efficient search engines such as Google would retrieve a variety of more accurate results whereas the not-so-efficient search engines would have a rough time displaying such type of results.[Diane Poremsky, Google and Other Search Engines. (Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press, 2004).]
The user’s experience with any particular search engine is equally an important factor in determining the number of users. For instance, Google injects a sense of humor when users interact with it. Features like "Do a drum roll”, "askew" and even "Easter eggs" are some of the most humorous features of Google that make it the most popular search engine among users. The interface design and speed also ...