ABSTRACT
This study evaluates how well eight major search engines produced answers to twenty-one real reference questions and 28five made-up subject questions. The retrieval and relevancy-ranking abilities of search engines were measured by precision, duplicate, most-relevant-item score, and relevancy-ranking score. Search engines did not produce good results for the reference questions, but did well with the subject questions. T-tests found the two types of questions quite different in nature, so the best engines were identified by the type of questions. Open Text was the best in handling the reference questions, and InfoSeek was the best at answering subject questions. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678. E-mail address: getinfo@haworth.com]
