Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test major web search engines on their performance on navigational queries, i.e. searches for homepages. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 100 user queries are posed to six search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Seekport, and Exalead). Users...

Purpose – The term selection problem for selecting query terms in information filtering and routing has been investigated using hill‐climbers of various kinds, largely through the Okapi experiments in the TREC series of conferences. Although these are simple deterministic approaches, which...

Purpose – The aim of the paper is to put forward a structured mechanism for web search evaluation. The paper seeks to point to useful scientific research and show how information practitioners can use these methods in evaluation of search on the web for their users. Design/methodology/approach...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how different aspects of an assessor's context, in particular their knowledge of a search topic, their interest in the search topic and their confidence in assessing relevance for a topic, affect the relevance judgements made and the assessor's...

Purpose – Interactive information retrieval (IR) involves many human cognitive shifts at different information behaviour levels. Cognitive science defines a cognitive shift or shift in cognitive focus as triggered by the brain's response and change due to some external force. This paper aims...

In this paper methods for both speeding up passage processing and examining more passages using parallel computers are explored. The number of passages processed are varied in order to examine the effect on retrieval effectiveness and efficiency. The particular algorithm applied has previously...

This paper examines the assessment of the Data Liberation Initiative (DLI), a data consortium, from the perspective of the program's functionality and fulfilment of stakeholder objectives. Two models are described which help assess how well the program succeeded in doing what it was intended to...