Webometric research has fallen into two main categories, namely link analysis and search engine evaluation. Search engines are also used to collect data for link analysis. A set of measurements is proposed for evaluating web search engine performance. Some measurements are adapted from the concepts of recall and precision, which are commonly used in evaluating traditional information retrieval systems. Others are newly developed to evaluate search engine stability, which is unique to web information retrieval systems. Overlapping of search results, annual growth of search results on each search engines, variation of results on search using synonyms are also used to evaluate the relative efficiency of search engines. In this study, the investigator attempts to conduct a webometric study on the topic medical tourism in Kerala using six search engines; these include three general search engines, namely Bing, Google, and Lycos, and three metasearch engines, namely Dogpile, ixquick, and WebCrawler.
Towards Next Generation Vertical Search Engines