Precision and Recall of Five Search Engines for Retrieval of Scholarly Information in the Field of Biotechnology

This paper presents the results of a research conducted about five search enginesAltaVista, Google, HotBot, Scirus and Bioweb -for retrieving scholarly information using Biotechnology related search terms. The search engines are evaluated taking the first ten results pertaining to 'scholarly information' for estimation of precision and recall. It shows that Scirus is most comprehensive in retrieving 'scholarly information' followed by Google and HotBot. It also reveals that the search engines (except Bioweb) perform well on structured queries while Bioweb performs better on unstructured queries.