1. Pick two search engines to compare such as Yahoo, Google, Bing, or DuckDuck Go.

– We’ve chosen Google and Yahoo.

2. Try lexically ambiguous searches, such as China or Washington.  What search engine handles your search better?  Why?  Do you see any clustering?

– When searching “China” on Google, it presents information and photos on the country of China. The first links of information are Wikipedia and Government sites. 

-When searching “China” on Yahoo, it presents similar information, but much more news stories. The first row of information is news stories. 

– Google is better in our opinion. Since Yahoo gives a lot of news, it seems like it’s not presenting the formal information about China as efficiently. 

-Both have clustering options at the top of the page to sort information into groups, but Google has more options. Yahoo has All, News, Videos, Images, Local, and Shopping categories. Google has News, Images, Maps, Perspectives, Videos, Taco, Taco Bell, Flag, and Currency. 

3. Try a sample search on both pages that is not (or is minimally) semantically ambigiuous. Considering only the top 20 results, which search engine offers better precision?  Why do you say so?

– We searched “What is the capital of China?” on both search engines. 

– Google and Yahoo offer equal precision of information as the top 20 results were all answered the question correctly on both search engines (20/20). However, on Yahoo you have to scroll past the advertised news articles to get to the real first 20 search results. For this reason, we prefer the precision of Google, even though the first 10 results of both answered out question. 

4. Is it possible to determine which search engine offers better recall?  Explain why or why not?

– No, this would be impossible. This would be impossible because the data is always changing and morphing, which makes it impossible to fully collect and analyze it.