On the Instability of Web Search Engines

The output of major WWW search engines was analyzed and the results led to some surprising observations about their stability. Twentyfive queries were issued repeatedly to the engines and the results were compared. After one month, the top ten results returned by eight out of nine engines had changed by more than fifty percent. Furthermore, five out of the nine engines returned over a third of their URLs intermittently during the month.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: RIAO
• Authors: Erik Selberg, Oren Etzioni
• Keywords: Fifty Percent, RIAO 2000, RIAO 2007, Surprising Observations, WWW Search Engines