Article

Agreeing to disagree: search engines and their public interfaces

Authors:
Frank McCown

Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA

Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA
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,
Michael L. Nelson

Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA

Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA
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JCDL '07: Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital librariesJune 2007Pages 309–318https://doi.org/10.1145/1255175.1255237

Published:18 June 2007Publication History

JCDL '07: Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries

Pages 309–318

ABSTRACT

Google, Yahoo and MSN all provide both web user interfaces (WUIs) and application programming interfaces (APIs) to their collections. Whether building collections of resources or studying the search engines themselves, the search engines request that researchers use their APIs and not "scrape" the WUIs. However, anecdotal evidence suggests the interfaces produce different results. We provide the first in depth quantitative analysis of the results produced by the Google, MSN and Yahoo API and WUI interfaces. We have queried both interfaces for five months and found significant discrepancies between the interfaces in several categories. In general, we found MSN to produce the most consistent results between their two interfaces. Our findings suggest that the API indexes are not older, but they are probably smaller for Google and Yahoo. We also examined how search results decay over time and built predictive models based on the observed decay rates. Based on our findings, it can take over a year for half of the top 10 results to a popular query to be replaced in Google and Yahoo; for MSN it may take only 2-3 months.

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Index Terms

Agreeing to disagree: search engines and their public interfaces
1. Information systems
  1. World Wide Web
    1. Web applications
    2. Web services

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Published in
JCDL '07: Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
June 2007
534 pages
ISBN:9781595936448
DOI:10.1145/1255175
General Chair:
Edie Rasmussen
University of British Columbia, Canada
,
Program Chairs:
Ray R. Larson
University of California, Berkeley
,
Elaine Toms
Dalhousie University, Canada
,
Shigeo Sugimoto
University of Tsukuba, Japan
Copyright © 2007 ACM
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Publication History
- Published: 18 June 2007
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Author Tags
API
distance measurement
search engine interfaces
search engine results
Qualifiers
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Agreeing to disagree: search engines and their public interfaces

JCDL '07: Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries

ABSTRACT

References

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Auditing the Personalization and Composition of Politically-Related Search Engine Results Pages

Search engines and their public interfaces: which apis are the most synchronized?

Research on Automatic Summarization Based on Search Engine Result