Empirical Evaluation of Social and Traditional Search Tools for Adhoc Information Retrieval

The nature of World Wide Web (www) has evolved over the passage of time. Easier and faster availability of Internet has given rise to huge volumes of data available online. Another cause of huge volumes of data is the emergence of online social networks (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) which has actually changed the role of data consumers to data generators. Increasing popularity of these online social networks has also changed the way different web services used to be used. For example, Facebook messaging has some impact on usage of emails; twitter usage affects (positively or negatively) online newspaper readings. Both of these platforms are heavily used for information searching. In this paper, we evaluate the role of Facebook and Twitter for academic queries and compare the findings with Google search engines to find out if there is a chance that these online social networks will replace Google sooner. A query set selected from the standard AOL dataset is used for experimentation. Academic related queries are selected and classified by expert users. Findings of Google, Facebook and Twitter are compared against these queries using Mean Average Precision (MAP), as a metrics for evaluation. Results conclude that Google has the dominating factor with a better MAP than Facebook and Twitter.