Abstract
The role of the Internet has become more and more important for both educators and students of English to obtain useful information quickly and easily. With the help of various search engines, one can find required information relatively easily. However, one may wonder which search engine should be used. The purpose of this paper is to examine which search engine is recommended to conduct searches on the Internet. A query is selected, single keyword searches and Implied Boolean searches were conducted, and retrieval matches, accuracy, access time, and ease-of use of seven search engines were compared. As a result, Alta Vista search engine indicated the largest number of hits in three single keyword searches, the second largest number of hits in the Implied Boolean search, and the largest relevancy rate (100%) in the Implied Boolean search. According to the result, Alta Vista is the best search engine among Web-based search engines. Also, Alta Vista was compared with the DIALOG, one of charged online search services. According to the comparison result, Alta Vista still needs to be improved in terms of proximity operators and truncation operators.
