Comparative Study of Tools for Finding Business Information on the World Wide Web

Abstract The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of leading Web search engines in finding relevant business information sought by researchers at a university-based industrial lubricants research center. The author selected tools to study and defined evaluation criteria. Staff from the Ag-Based Industrial Lubricants Research Program, University of Northern Iowa, provided 15 topics on which they need current information. The author created and executed simple mode searches to find material on these topics. The research center staff rated the relevance of the first 10 results for each query for each search tool. The staff also rated the overall effectiveness of each tool in meeting the information need for each query. The tools were rated on the relevancy of results, number of duplicates, and number of inactive links. Sites getting the top relevancy rating were categorized.