Volume 2, No 3, 2005
How Do Search Engines Handle Chinese Queries?
Haidar Moukdad and Hong Cui
Abstract
The use of languages other than English has been growing exponentially on the Web. However, the major search engines have been lagging behind in providing indexes and search features to handle these languages. This article explores the characteristics of the Chinese language and how queries in this language are handled by different search engines. Queries were entered in two major search engines (Google and AlltheWeb) and two search engines developed for Chinese (Sohu and Baidu). Criteria such as handling word segmentation, number of retrieved documents, and correct display and identification of Chinese characters were used to examine how the search engines handled the queries. The results showed that the performance of the two major search engines was not on a par with that of the search engines developed for Chinese.
Pages: 1-6
Keywords: World Wide Web, Search engines, Chinese language