Abstract
Webometric research has fallen into two main categories, namely link analysis and search engine evaluation. Search engines are also used to collect data for link analysis. A set of measurements is proposed for evaluating web search engine performance. Some measurements are adapted from the concepts of recall and precision, which are commonly used in evaluating traditional information retrieval systems. Others are newly developed to evaluate search engine stability, which is unique to web information retrieval systems. Overlapping of search results, annual growth of search results on each search engines, variation of results on search using synonyms are also used to evaluate the relative efficiency of search engines. In this study, the investigator attempts to conduct a webometric study on the topic medical tourism in Kerala using six search engines; these include three general search engines, namely Bing, Google, and Lycos, and three metasearch engines, namely Dogpile, ixquick, and WebCrawler.
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Larson (1996) conducted an exploratory study to examine the explosive growth and the bibliometrics of the World Wide Web based on both analysis of over 30 gigabytes of web pages collected by the Inktomi “WebCrawler” and on the use of the DEC AltaVista search engine for co citation analysis of a set of Earth science related websites. The statistical characteristics of web documents and their hypertext links are examined, along with the characteristics of highly cited web documents.
Almind and Ingwersen (1997) coined the term webometrics and introduce the application of informetric method to World Wide Web. They presented a case study with a workable method for general informetric analysis of the World Wide Web.
Abraham (1997) mentioned the part of the webometry project that dealt with the explosive growth of the World Wide Web. It may be viewed as the neurogenetic phase in the embryogenesis of a new planetary civilization. He proposed strategies for visualizing the complexity of the World Wide Web, which is seen as a neural act. He put forward three progress reports, the first one concentrating on studying the nodes and links of the web and the second and third dealing with the density of the links.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Kerala: Kerala is a southern state of India, which has emerged as a reputed tourist destination in the world and known by the name “God’s own country.”
Medical Tourism: Medical tourism is defined as any kind of travel to make a person or member of his family healthier.
Web Resources: The information sources available on the world wide web are called web resources.