Abstract
This is a preprint of an article published in the
Journal of Information Science Vol. 32, No. 2, 131-148
(2006). This study measures the frequency in which
search engines update their indices. Therefore, 38
websites that are updated on a daily basis were
analysed within a time-span of six weeks. The analysed
search engines were Google, Yahoo and MSN. We find that
Google performs best overall with the most pages
updated on a daily basis, but only MSN is able to
update all pages within a time-span of less than 20
days. Both other engines have outliers that are quite
older. In terms of indexing patterns, we find different
approaches at the different engines: While MSN shows
clear update patterns, Google shows some outliers and
the update process of the Yahoo index seems to be quite
chaotic. Implications are that the quality of different
search engine indices varies and not only one engine
should be used when searching for current content.
Users
Please
log in to take part in the discussion (add own reviews or comments).