How Do Parsijoo, Parseek and Google Respond to the Students’ Course-related Queries?

This study aimed to identify the quality of web pages retrieved by Parsijoo and Parseek Persian search engines and Google to respond to students' course-related queries. This study was conducted using evaluations from a researcher-made checklist. The first population included Persian and Google search engines selected from Persian, Parsijoo, and Parseek search engines. The second population included the keywords of the section for collecting data from the fourth, fifth, and sixth-grade elementary school science textbooks, from which 12 keywords were selected by simple random sampling. The third population included web pages retrieved for each keyword by search engines. From the first ten results retrieved in each keyword search, relevant pages were selected as the sample. The results revealed that the quality of the web pages retrieved by all three search engines, i.e., Parsijoo, Parseek, and Google, was above average. However, there was a significant difference between the engines regarding the number of relevant results. This is the first study investigating the quality of web pages retrieved by search engines to respond to students' course-related queries. The study results can help the designers and developers of Persian search engines improve their performance in retrieving high-quality pages and gaining a proper place among Iranian users.