Discovering geographic web services in search engines
| Pages | 909-927 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521111193193 |
| Date | 29 November 2011 |
| Published date | 29 November 2011 |
| Author | Francisco J. Lopez‐Pellicer,Aneta J. Florczyk,Rubén Béjar,Pedro R. Muro‐Medrano,F. Javier Zarazaga‐Soria |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Discovering geographic web
services in search engines
Francisco J. Lopez-Pellicer, Aneta J. Florczyk, Rube
´nBe
´jar,
Pedro R. Muro-Medrano and F. Javier Zarazaga-Soria
Advanced Information Systems Laboratory (IAAA),
Department of Computer Science and Systems Engineering,
Universidad Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain
Abstract
Purpose – There is an open discussion in the geographic information community about the use of
digital libraries or search engines for the discovery of resources. Some researchers suggest that search
engines are a feasible alternative for searching geographic web services based on anecdotal evidence.
The purpose of this study is to measure the performance of Bing (formerly Microsoft Live Search),
Google and Yahoo! in searching standardised XML documents that describe, identify and locate
geographic web services.
Design/methodology/approach – The study performed an automated evaluation of three search
engines using their application programming interfaces. The queries asked for XML documents
describing geographic web services, and documents containing links to those documents. Relevant
XML documents linked from the documents found in the search results were also included in the
evaluation.
Findings – The study reveals that the discovery of geographic web services in search engines does
not require the use of advanced search operators. Data collected suggest that a resource-oriented
search should combine simple queries to search engines with the exploration of the pages linked from
the search results. Finally the study identifies Yahoo! as the best performer.
Originality/value – This is the first study that measures and compares the performance of major
search engines in the discovery of geographic web services. Previous studies were focused on
demonstrating the technical feasibility of the approach. The paper also reveals that some technical
advances in search engines could harm resource-oriented queries.
Keywords Search engines,Geographic information, Web services, Discovery,
Open geospatialconsortium, Information retrieval,Geographic information systems
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Users can search for a specific web site, for information, or to obtain web resources.
Broder (2002,p. 6) classified thesesearches as transactional, whose purposeis “to reach a
site where further interaction will happen”. Rose andLevinson (2004) included this kind
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This work has been partially funded through the EuroGeoSource project (project
number 250532) from the European Union’s ICT Policy Support Programme, as
part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme, the Spanish
Government (projects “Espan
˜a Virtual” ref. CENIT 2008-1030 and
TIN2009-10971), and GeoSpatiumLab SL. The work of Aneta J. Florczyk has been partially
supported by a grant (ref. AP2007-03275) from the Spanish government. This work reflects only
the authors’ views and the European Union is not liable for any use that might be made of
information contained therein.
Discovering
geographic web
services
909
Received 15 September 2010
Accepted 6 February 2011
Online Information Review
Vol. 35 No. 6, 2011
pp. 909-927
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684521111193193
of search within a broader category and coined the term resource queries. Resource
searches arethose searches where the goal is to get accessto an interactive resource, or to
collect a list of interactive resources for later use. The most common queries with a
resource goal are those related to the downloading of music and movies. Resource
queries can target very specific domain resources such as malware, source code, web
forms and web services (see Long, 2007). Nevertheless resource-oriented searches seem
to be viewed as less worthy of attention than other types in the research about the
performance of search engines. Rose and Levinson (2004, p. 14) expressed their belief
that “resource searches are a relatively neglected category in the search engine world”.
The advances in search technology have changed how people search for resources.
Several studies (Brophy and Bawden, 2005; Norris et al., 2008; Lewandowski, 2010)
confirm and measure the ability of some search engines to provide access and replace
full-text search in some digital library systems. The geographic information
community, where the discovery of geographic resources is based on the digital
library metaphor (see Be
´jar et al., 2009), has started to evaluate the potential of search
engines to conduct some distributed discovery tasks. The cause of this interest is that
today many of the available discovery systems are pilot projects (see Vandenbroucke
et al., 2008; Khalsa et al., 2009). There are studies about the ability of search engines in
the discovery of geographic web services (Bartley, 2005; Refractions Research, 2006;
Sample et al., 2006; Lopez-Pellicer et al., 2010; Wenwen et al., 2010). However their
findings are questionable, as they seem to be based on anecdotal evidence. The
available literature has a strong bias towards Google, and it often does not disclose
measures of performance except for the amount of services discovered.
The purpose of this study is to measure the performance of the public search
application programming interfaces (APIs) of the three main commercial search
engines – Bing (formerly Microsoft Live Search), Google and Yahoo! – in discove ring
geographic web services. With the required caution when generalising the results
obtained from the search APIs, the collected data could help to address the following
questions not answered by the available literature:
.How do the search engines perform?
.Which is the best-suited search engine?
.Which is the best discovery strategy?
This paper is structuredin five parts. First, concepts related to geographic webservices
and previous studies on searching geographic web services are presented. Next the
methodology of the study is described. Then the results are presented and examined.
After that several aspects of the methodology and the findings are discussed. In
conclusion the findings are summarised and their implications are identified.
Background
In this section we introduce a number of important concepts related to the discovery of
geographic web services.
Geographic web services
The effective use of geographic resources is of critical importance in a
knowledge-based economy (see Longley et al., 2005). It is essential for many
activities to have web access to geographic resources. From the response to a disaster
OIR
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