Search engines and their public interfaces: which apis are the most synchronized?

ABSTRACT

Researchers of commercial search engines often collect datausing the application programming interface (API) or by"scraping" results from the web user interface (WUI), butanecdotal evidence suggests the interfaces produce differentresults. We provide the first in-depth quantitative analysisof the results produced by the Google, MSN and Yahoo APIand WUI interfaces. After submitting a variety of queriesto the interfaces for 5 months, we found significant discrepanciesin several categories. Our findings suggest that theAPI indexes are not older, but they are probably smaller for Google and Yahoo. Researchers may use our findings tobetter understand the differences between the interfaces andchoose the best API for their particular types of queries.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services
          Subjects: Web-based services

General Terms:
Experimentation, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
API, search engine