The Precision and Recall of General Search Engines in Retreival of Images Related to Endocrine Diseases

This research aimed at determining and comparing the precision and recall of general search engines to retrieve images of important diseases in the field of endocrinology.

An analaytical survey was conducted in this applied research, for which 50 keywords in the field of 5 endocrine diseases were selected, and the 30 top images retrieved by each search engine were stored and analyzed, using precision and recall measurement formulas and excel software.

This research show that Google search engine has the most percision (35%) followed by the Bing and Yahoo search engines. Images retrieved for adrenal diseases had the most percision (42%) in google while it was (16%) in yahoo. The Bing search engine had the most recall (77%), followed by the google and yahoo search engines. Diabetes mellitus had the most recall (97%) in the google and bing search engines. Adrenal diseases had the least recall (30%) using yahoo search engine.

Results show that Google and bing search engines were in competition with each other and professionals of endocrinology and other researchers can use these search engines, Google and bing in particular, to retrieve the best medical images. Librarians also can use and recommend these two search engines to related professionals for retrieving medical images of adrenal, pituitary, thyroid, diabetes and para-thyroid diseases.