A comparative study of search engines for sports information retrieval on the web

Introduction

Internet has applied to the fields of sports information widely in recent years and the network of the vast information resources has brought a new opportunity and challenge for the traditional means of sports information. It is nearly impossible to improve the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the sports documentation you wanted just by means of visiting the website on Internet. A well-chosen search engine with the application of its retrieval means can obtain a satisfactory retrieval result for sports document on the web.

Methods

With the methods of documentation, online information and the overview of the subject and on the basis of the research findings of some scholars such as Lebedev (Moscow Univ.) and Pence (SUNY Oneonta), it has made an analysis of the retrieval features of main search engines and made a comparative study of the hits of main search engines in sports scientific information retrieval.

Results

Search engines have many kinds of searching means. Most of them offer keyword searching with Boolean logic retrieval, while some of them support the retrieval means of phrase, field and truncation. The combination of retrieval expression can offer some help to the inquiry of sports documentation. In order to find out the best or the most suitable search engines for sports scientific information on the web, it has made a comparative study of the hits of main search engines in sports scientific information retrieval. Based on the experimental ways of Lebedev, who has drawn the conclusion that AltaVista is the best and Pence, who regards Google as the best, 6 usual key words (altitude training, anaerobic, steroid, metabolism，isometric and biomechanics), chosen randomly in sports scientific literature have been respectively inputted into 10 main search engines, such as Google, AltaVista, Hotbot, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, etc. Those search engines with long time searching and less hit percentage have been eliminated from this study (maybe some search engines have been shielded in a certain place) and 4 search engines (Google, Hotbot, Yahoo and Lycos) have been elected due to their satisfactory hit results.

Discussion / Conclusions

Based on this comparative study, it has been proved that Google rather than AltaVista is one of the best or the most suitable engines at present for the comprehensiveness, accuracy, currency and efficiency in the sports scientific information retrieval on Internet. This conclusion is conformity with the result of Pence and Sullivan[1] , but not with the previous result of Lebedev[2], due to the rapid development of Internet.

References

[1].Harry E. Pence. Evaluating Search Engines for Chemistry-II. http://employees.oneonta.edu/pencehe/engineselect01.html .
[2]. Alexander Lebedev. Best Search Engines for Finding Scientific Information on the Web. http://www.chem.msu.su/eng/comparison.html .