A Comparative Study of Diversity in Search Results of Search Engines

Abstract

The effectiveness of web information retrieval systems could be measured through many factors and one of the most important elements is the diversity of returned search results. In this paper, we evaluate the diversity of two very popular search engines (i.e. Google and Yahoo) for multi-faceted queries and compare them. We use entity-based approach for this purpose by taking into consideration the novelty of the entities. We evaluate the diversity of these search engines on behalf of 1) Common Entities, 2) Novelty, and 3) Grouping the documents. We use a manually collected data collection for our experiments. We find out that search results returned by Yahoo are more diverse than those of Google. Google results are found to be more coherent in their similarities as far as common entities are concerned.