Retrieval Performance of Fuzzy and Non-fuzzy Search Engines and Overlap among them

Compares the performance of fuzzy and non-fuzzy search engines and measures the overlap among them.

Search engines included were selected by accidental classified and purposeful sampling. Data was gathered using three lists based on a subject headings list, carried out in three formats including search questions, phrases, and keywords search.

Meta Crawler, Bing, and Emerald showed the highest rate of precision among the non-fuzzy search engines respectively, while Google, Yahoo and ASK obtained the showed the highest level of precision among the fuzzy ones respectively. With regard to keyword searching, Bing and Meta Crawler showed the highest level of overlap, while Yahoo and Meta Crawler had the highest level of overlap in question searching. With regards to phrase searching, the most overlap was between Yahoo and Meta Crawler. Emerald results were had no overlap with the other five search engines in the three types of queries. This could be seen as its poor performance.

Overall performance of fuzzy search engines was better. Except for Emerald, other search engines showed considerable levels of overlap.