www.tjprc.org editor@tjprc.org COMPREHENSIVENESS, DEAD LINKS AND DUPLICACY OF SELECT MAJOR SEARCH ENGINES IN THE FIELD OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE PEERZADA MOHAMMAD IQBAL 1 , ABDUL MAJEED BABA 2 & AASIM BASHIR 3 1 Professional Assistant, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology, Kashmir, India 2 HEAD, Department of Library and Information Science, University of Kashmir, India 3 Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Kashmir, India ABSTRACT This paper presents the results of a research conducted on seven search engines- Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, Baidu, Dogpile and DuckDuckgo for comprehensiveness, Dead links and Duplicacy of Select search engines using Library and Information Science related search terms. The search engines are evaluated by taking the first twenty results pertaining to “Dead links” & “Duplicacy”. It shows that Google is most comprehensive in its database while DuckDuckGo retrieved the most number of dead links. On the other hand DuckDuckGo and Dogpile show most number of Duplicacy in Library and Information Science search terms. The research also reveals that Baidu retrieved the most scholarly URL’s in Library Science field. KEYWORDS: Search Engine, Dead Links, Comprehensiveness, Duplicacy, Library and Information Science Received: Jun 16, 2016; Accepted: Jun 29, 2016; Published: Jul 12, 2016; Paper Id.: IJLSRAUG20161 INTRODUCTION The World Wide Web can be used as a quick and direct reference to get any type of information in electronic format all over the world. However, information found on the Web needs to be filtered and may include voluminous misinformation or non relevant information. The user or Internet surfer may not be aware of quality search engines to get information on a topic quickly and may use different search strategies. Finding useful information quickly on the Internet poses a challenge to both the ordinary users and the information professionals. Though the performance of currently available search engines has been improving continuously with powerful search capabilities of various types, the lack of comprehensive coverage, the inability to predict the quality of retrieved results, and the absence of controlled vocabularies make it difficult for users to use search engines effectively. The use of the Internet as an information resource needs to be carefully evaluated as no traditional quality standards or control have been applied to the Web. Librarians need to be able to provide informative recommendations to their clientele regarding the selection of search engines and their effective search strategies. OBJECTIVES The following objectives are laid down for the study: • To Select Search Engines & Search Terms for the Study There are countless numbers of search engines over the internet. Some are active while others are inactive, some are country bound other are global, some are subjective, unilingual, etc while others are general, multilingual etc. Selection of search engines will be based on the following parameters. Original Article International Journal of Library Science and Research (IJLSR) ISSN(P): 2250-2351; ISSN(E): 2321-0079 Vol. 6, Issue 4, Aug 2016, 1-10 © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.