Comparing Search Engines and Meta-search Engines in Pharmaceutics Information Retrieval

One of the ways to retrieve the expert information from internet is using search tools. This research was aimed to measure the relevance of documents retrieved from search and meta-search engines in the field of pharmacology. Findings help web users, especially pharmaceutics researches and specialists, to know the search tools cover more pharmaceutics information and use them to access the required information. In this descriptive research, 6 major search and 6 major meta-search engines, introduced by the website of www.searchenginewatch.com as well-used internet search tools, were chosen. Pharmaceutics keywords were chosen from medical subject Headings (Mesh) and then selected terms of pharmacology were searched in each of search engines. The first 10 results of search engines were selected for evaluation of recall and precision. Data were analyzed with Excel. Yahoo retrieved the most pharmaceutics documents and scored the highest rank (34%). Aol had 62% precision and 21% recall and retrieved the most relevant pharmaceutics documents. Dogpile retrieved the most pharmaceutics documents and scored the highest rank (22%), followed by Metacrawler (21%) and Info (19%). Excite had 62% precision and 22% recall and retrieved the most relevant pharmaceutics documents. Search and meta-search engines are suitable tools for amateur or professional users and they have suitable search capabilities and facilities. Although using search engines in retrieving relevant documents is useful, but it is suggested that users follow the search in several search engines to access the relevant documents among the vastly available sources on web.