5/2/2020 Precision and Recall of Five Search Engines for Retrieval of Scholarly Information in the Field of Biotechnology www.webology.org/2005/v2n2/a12.html 1/7 Webology, Volume 2, Number 2, August, 2005 Home Table of Contents Titles & Subject Index Authors Index Precision and Recall of Five Search Engines for Retrieval of Scholarly Information in the Field of Biotechnology S. M. Shafi Department of Library and Information Science, University of Kashmir, Srinagar-India 190006 Rafiq A. Rather Department of Library and Information Science, University of Kashmir, Srinagar-India 190006 Received May 10, 2005; Accepted August 9, 2005 Abstract This paper presents the results of a research conducted about five search engines- AltaVista, Google, HotBot, Scirus and Bioweb -for retrieving scholarly information using Biotechnology related search terms. The search engines are evaluated taking the first ten results pertaining to 'scholarly information' for estimation of precision and recall. It shows that Scirus is most comprehensive in retrieving 'scholarly information' followed by Google and HotBot. It also reveals that the search engines (except Bioweb) perform well on structured queries while Bioweb performs better on unstructured queries. Keywords Search engine, Precision and recall, Scholarly information, Structured and unstructured queries, World Wide Web Introduction The Web is growing as the fastest communication medium. This technology in combination with latest electronic storage devices enable us to keep track of enormous amount of information available to the information society ( Schlichting & Nilsen, 1996). In less than ten years, it has grown from an esoteric system for use by a small community of researchers to the de-facto method of obtaining information for millions of individuals, many of whom have never encountered, and have no interest in the issues of retrieving information from databases ( Oppenheiem et al., 2000). A plethora of search engines ranging from general to subject specific are the chief resource discoverers on the Web. These engines search an enormous volume of information at apparently impressive speed but have been the subject of wide criticism for retrieving duplicate, irrelevant and non- scholarly information. The reasons include their comprehensive databases having information on different magnitude like media, marketing, entertainment, advertisement etc. Mainly, these do not sift information from scholar's point of view though some search engines like Google have developed separate applications for disseminating scholarly information like 'Google Scholar' (The tool was incorporated in Google after starting of the