Navigating the World Wide Web

Navigating the World Wide Web

Evaluating the performance of the search engines Bing and search.yahoo.com form the basis of this analysis. Both search engines were tested using Boolean and exact string match-based searches. Both were also tested to see if they would allow for iterative fine-tuning of results as well. The results indicate that Bing is significantly faster and more comprehensive, and more tailorable to iterative searches to refine results for the term Tenured & Post-tenure review models.

Bing's initial results based on a Boolean search yielded 26,100 terms for the search phrase with "Post-tenure review" being the most often-found phrase in the analysis. Bing's simplistic initial interface can be used to successfully define more iterative Boolean searches, with significantly trims down extraneous search results. On a second iteration of the term applied to existing search results, isolating just on the phrase "post-tenure review" there were 3,690 total results all of them relevant to the topic. Bing also supports exact phrase matching, as do all search engines. Using this feature however failed to produce any results.

What Bing's greatest strength is the continual refining of search results based on iterations of searches, tailoring each to the specific constraints to be applied to searches over time. In this way, Bing allows for more of a select set of results to be defined, giving a high probability of getting results would be useful. While Bing does not have the breadth of coverage that Yahoo or Google has, they do have more precision in terms of their results. The iteration of search results also makes it possible to narrow down by domain name and also by location (country) if that is a requirement. Bing's use of file extensions as part of search results is useful, as the test of adding .PDF to the phrase Tenured & Post-tenure review models yielded an entire page of links to PDFs on the subject. This is especially useful when doing research. A limitation of Bing in this area however is the lack of citation support provided however that is found in EBSCO Host or ProQuest, two excellent academic databases. In conclusion, the iterative nature of Bing is very effective in targeting content of interest and the use of specific operands or qualifiers including .PDF work well. The only limitation however is the amount of content indexed at this point by the search engine.