In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science

Subha Subramanian
will defend her thesis

Analysis of Search Precision

Search engines have emerged as a natural consequence of the explosive rate of growth of the Web, providing every user with a window to the Web, based on their query. They have made the transition from a scientific tool to a ubiquitous entity that has made its way into our homes and lives. However, the search engines of today are far more evolved than those of just a few years ago. The effectiveness, or precision, of a search engine is measured by the relevance of the results it retrieves to the user's query. There are several factors that affect the precision of a search engine, the biggest external factor being the practice of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), by which a Web page's ranking is boosted artificially.

The practice of SEO will be evaluated for www.aimasoft.com and its effect on Aimasoft rankings will be analyzed. This is the first study to measure the precision of the first thirty results returned by a search engine, for which we evaluate ten major search engines. We determine the effectiveness of crawler based search engines versus directories and metasearches in retrieving relevant results. We show that even though SEO can adversely affect rankings, the ranking methods of search engines ensure more often than not that valid sites get better rankings, increasing precision.