Measuring the efficiency of search engines: an application of data envelopment analysis

Donald Lien and Yan Peng

Applied Economics, 1999, vol. 31, issue 12, 1581-1587

Abstract: This paper adopted the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to investigate the efficiency of several search engines. A query search on a search engine is modelled as a production process. The input and output vectors are defined and measured accordingly. We studied seven engines, Alta Vista, Excite, Hotbot, Lycos, Infoseek, Open Text, and WebCrawler and found that Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek, and WebCrawler are efficient but the other three are not. Possible efficiency improvements are calculated.

Date: 1999
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DOI: 10.1080/000368499323102

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