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A technical evaluation of ten internet search engines for indexing and retrieving scientific literature
(Sokoine University of Agriculture, 2001) Busagala, l. S. P.
Several public Search Engines exist of which their coverage and response time differ. Now which one does perform best under the present connectivity? This study aimed at investigating the information indexing and retrieval effectiveness and efficiency of ten selected search engines under different connection speeds at two University Libraries namely Sokoine University of Agriculture (SNAL) and University of Dar es salaam Library (UDSM). Google followed by Yahoo outnumbered all the other eight-search engines in terms of relevance, precision, and responsiveness. In terms of other features such as phrase searching, simple and natural language interface, high quality of display results, these search engines were the best. MetaSearch engines especially MetaCrawler performed the worst in indexing and retrieving scientific literature particularly at UDSM library. There was a significant difference of search engines performances between the two connection speeds. User information searching skills was notably poor calling an action from information professionals.