Reviews of Internet search engines tend to concentrate on popularity or on sheer numbers of results, on the results' apparent relevance to search queries, or on the programming that make the results possible. For instance, Search Engine Watch regularly ranks search engines by billions of documents indexed (Sullivan, "Search Engine Sizes"), by number of users (Sullivan, "Nielsen NetRatings"), or by number of searches (Sullivan, "Searches per Day"). Search Engine Watch also publishes lists of the companies providing the basic data displayed by search engines; in almost all cases, search engines display Google or Yahoo data (Sullivan, "Who Powers Whom"). Tang and Sun have rated search engines in terms of the amount of effort required of a searcher to see relevant results and provide a literature review of other attempts at evaluating search engines.
If search engine reviews discuss interfaces, they concentrate on input features made possible by new programming. For example, the monthly search engine column in Online magazine merely lists new interface features, along with increases in numbers of documents indexed or new types of documents indexed (Notess).
None of these reviews evaluate the interfaces themselves. A computer interface includes input devices, dialog structures, and output displays; in most cases these are computer keyboards, search boxes on a computer screen, and lists of hyperlinked texts on a computer screen. These are not the only possibilites, however. Information scientists have imagined interfaces that make visible the paths other searchers have followed to reach certain pieces of information (Chalmers, Rodden & Brodbeck) or interfaces that make pieces of information visible as monsters in a video game (Chao), but these interfaces are not currently operating as parts of search engines on the Web.
Even though Internet search engines occupy a huge space in students' lives, there seems to be little examination of the effect of search engines on students. The interfaces of popular search engine such as Yahoo and Google simulate annotated bibliographies, a very abstract form. Information does not have to be presented as title lists. This review will present a few of the search interfaces currently available and briefly analyze the rhetorical limitations of input and output displays.
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Analysis | Input & Output |
Examples |
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