Comparative Study of the Search Engines on the Basis of the Relevant Links on the First Web Page

Web search engines are the keys to the huge knowledge treasure of information and are used to extract query specific information from the complete database. Every search engine uses its own algorithm to rank the relevant links returned by the search engine. It is therefore essential for the user to understand the difference between the search engines in order to attain higher satisfaction level in terms of the result retrieved on the basis of users query. There is great assortment of search engines which offers various options to the web user. Thus it is significant to evaluate and compare the search engines in the quest of the best search engine which will provide the best result in the form of more number of informative links with the relevant result description on the first web page. The purpose of this paper is to compare four major search engines (Yahoo, Google, Ask, and Bing) for their retrieval efficiency on the query topics given from different fields (Computer Science, Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics). The parameter which is taken to judge the best search engine providing no of relevant link on the first web page is "Number of relevant links returned for the query on the first page" and finding the best search result for the random query topics taken from the different fields (Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics). The research involves real life queries which are used frequently by researchers and academicians on regular basis and the result of the queries are analyzed. Based on the above results, tables are created and analysis is done for evaluating the performance of the four selected search engines. Performance is measured on the quality of the result returned on the first page of the search engine. The analysis of the result is done using the statistical tool-ANOVA (Analysis of Variance). By this analysis we evaluate the relative performance of these search engines.