Abstract

In this paper we report on a series of tests we have done over three generations of search engines and comment on the completeness of their coverage. The existing and new search systems, while becoming more focused, tend nonetheless to generate misses and false hits; this is due to the fact that they attempt to match the specified search terms without context in the target information resource. Our tests, repeated over three generation of search engines, over the last few years show that while the recall for a simple search has increased, the precision has actually ecreased. We give some reasons for this decrease and suggest the need for increasing the intelligence of the search process by adding semantics information to the indexing scheme.