Finding information on the World Wide Web: the retrieval effectiveness of search engines
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
First 20 precision among World Wide Web search services (search engines)
Journal of the American Society for Information Science
Ask-an-expert services analysis
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Information Retrieval Today
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
ACM SIGIR Forum
Understanding user goals in web search
Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web
Web Search: Public Searching of the Web (Information Science and Knowledge Management)
Web Search: Public Searching of the Web (Information Science and Knowledge Management)
A field study characterizing Web-based information-seeking tasks
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Question types in public libraries' digital reference service in Finland: Comparing 1999 and 2006
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Evaluation of the NSDL and google for obtaining pedagogical resources
ECDL'05 Proceedings of the 9th European conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries
Studying trailfinding algorithms for enhanced web search
Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
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This paper evaluates to which extent Google retrieved correct answers as responses to queries inferred from factual and topical requests in a digital Ask-a-Librarian service. 100 factual and 100 topical questions were picked from a digital reference service run by public libraries. The queries inferred simulated average Web queries. The top 10 retrieval results were observed for the answer. The inspection was stopped when the first correct answer was identified. Google retrieved correct answers to 42 % of the topical questions and 29 % of factual questions. Results concerning the characteristics of queries and retrieval effectiveness are also presented. Evaluations indicate that public libraries' reference services answer correctly 55 % of the questions. Thus, Google is not outperforming Ask-a-Librarian service, although it seems to perform relatively satisfactory in retrieving answers to topical questions.