Article

Agreeing to disagree: search engines and their public interfaces

Authors:

Michael L. NelsonAuthors Info & Claims

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

Pages 309 - 318

https://doi.org/10.1145/1255175.1255237

Published: 18 June 2007 Publication History

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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cover image ACM Conferences

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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Published: 18 June 2007

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https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26438-2_39
Yang DLi ZJiang HTyson GLi HXie GZeng Y(2022)A deep dive into DNS behavior and query failuresComputer Networks10.1016/j.comnet.2022.109131(109131)Online publication date: Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2022.109131
Akbari SEscobedo A(2022)Top-k List Aggregation: Mathematical Formulations and Polyhedral ComparisonsCombinatorial Optimization10.1007/978-3-031-18530-4_4(51-63)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18530-4_4
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