An investigation of the effectiveness of the “similar pages” feature of Google

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/14684520810889673
Published date20 June 2008
Pages370-378
Date20 June 2008
AuthorNadjla Hariri
Subject MatterInformation & knowledge management,Library & information science
An investigation of the
effectiveness of the “similar
pages” feature of Google
Nadjla Hariri
Department of Library and Information Science,
Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Purpose – One of the relevance feedback techniques used in search engines is providing a link to
similar documents for each retrieved document in a results page. The purpose of this paper is to assess
whether the “similar pages” relevance feedback feature of Google is truly effective in retrieving
documents relevant to the information needs of users.
Design/methodology/approach – The effectiveness of the “similar pages” feature of Google was
investigated using 30 paired searches conducted by 30 users with real information needs. The precision
ratio of the results of the initial searches and of the searches conducted by clicking the “similar pages”
links of the four most relevant results of each initial search were compared. The time spent and the
overlapped results of the two kinds of searches were also compared.
Findings – The mean values for precision of and time spent on the “similar pages” searches were
significantly less than those for the initial searches. Although, the number of overlapping documents
in the “similar pages” searches was higher than that for the initial searches, the difference was not
statistically significant.
Practical implications The findings of this research would be useful for search engine designers
as well as the numerous users of common search engines, especially Google, to decide if “similar
pages” features truly enhance the quality of information retrieval on the web.
Originality/value – The experimental evidence provided in this paper relates to system design of
information retrieval systems on the web.
Keywords Search engines,Internet, Inter-computer links
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
The amount of information accessible via the world wide web has grown to gigantic
proportions. Despite this ever-increasing amount of information on the web, users want
their search hits to be relevant to their search queries all the time. However, this is not
always the case. Information retrieval technology is not yet developed enough to
provide completely accurate search results all the time. The relevance feedback
techniques developed in the 1970s and 1980s were designed to overcome the problem of
supplying irrelevant documents to the user. Relevance feedback is an information
retrieval technique where users inform the system of their evaluation of document
relevance and the system then uses this information to provide a revised list of search
results. Users of web search engines often find it difficult to express their information
needs in queries and their queries may not adequately represent what they are really
looking for. If users can identify examples of the kind of documents they need, they can
use relevance feedback to inform the system and get other similar documents.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
OIR
32,3
370
Refereed article received
26 September 2007
Approved for publication
14 February 2008
Online Information Review
Vol. 32 No. 3, 2008
pp. 370-378
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684520810889673

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