An Evaluation of How Search Engines Respond to Greek Language Queries

Over 20 billion Web pages from around the world have been indexed by search engines. This study investigates how search engines respond to non-English queries and more specifically to Greek language queries. To address this we conducted an evaluation using Greek queries in ten search engines: five "global" (A9, AltaVista, Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo!) and five Greek (Anazitisi, Ano-Kato, Phantis. Trinity, and Visto). A set of navigational queries for known Greek organizations was created. The organizations correspond to ten categories: government departments, universities, colleges, travel agencies, museums, media (TV, radio, newspapers), transportation, and banks. Searches were performed using the Greek and its corresponding English, Latin, or transliterated name of each organization. The ideal retrieval would be to get the website of that organization ranked first in the result set. The results of this evaluation are presented in this paper, together with a report on how the engines respond to Greek and Anglicized queries, and on the best performing global and Greek search engines.