Think local, search global? Comparing search engines for searching geographically specific information

This study evaluates the retrieval of New Zealand information using three local New Zealand search engines, four major global search engines and three metasearch engines. Searches for NZ topics were carried out on all the search engines, and the relative recall calculated. The local search engines did not achieve higher recall than the global search engines or metasearch engines, but no search engine achieved more than 45 percent recall. Despite the theoretical advantage of searching the databases of several individual search engines, metasearch engines did not achieve higher recall. Of relevant pages for the queries, 36 percent were outside the .nz domain. Implications for searching for geographically specific information, and for evaluation of search engines, are discussed.