Volume 2, No 2, 2005

Search Engines and Resource Discovery on the Web: Is Dublin Core an Impact Factor?


Mehdi Safari

Abstract

This study evaluates the effectiveness of the Dublin Core metadata elements on the retrieval of web pages in a suite of six search engines, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Google, Excite, Lycos, and WebCrawler. The effectiveness of four elements, including title, creator, subject and contributor, that concentrate on resource discovery was experimentally evaluated. Searches were made of the keywords extracted from web pages of the Iranian International Journal of Science, before and after metadata implementation. In each search, the ranking of the first specific reference to the exact web page was recorded. The comparison of results and statistical analysis did not reveal a significant difference between control and experimental groups in the retrieval ranks of the web pages.


Pages: 1-14

Keywords: Metadata, Dublin Core, Resource discovery, World Wide Web, Search engines

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