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Operators Not Needed? The Impact of Query Structure on Web Searching Results

Operators Not Needed? The Impact of Query Structure on Web Searching Results
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Author(s): Bernard J. Jansen (The Pennsylvania State University, USA)
Copyright: 2003
Pages: 4
Source title: Information Technology & Organizations: Trends, Issues, Challenges & Solutions
Source Editor(s): Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, D.B.A. (Information Resources Management Association, USA)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59140-066-0.ch218
ISBN13: 9781616921248
EISBN13: 9781466665330

Abstract

Most Web searchers use extremely simple queries. There is an assumption that the correct use of query operators will improve the quality of results. We test his assumption by examining the impact of query operators on the documents retrieved from Web searching. We compare the results from queries without operators to results from the same queries using a variety of operators on several major web search engines. There were 1900 queries submitted, which returned 18,332 documents. In general, there was an average 66% similarity between results from the queries with and without operators. Implications on the effectiveness of current searching techniques, for future search engine design and of future research are discussed.

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