The Internet has become an indispensable tool for finding information quickly using a search engine. The usefulness of the information retrieved, is open to questions. It depends on the keyword used, the search criteria, the judgement of the user, and also on the effectiveness of the search engine. There are some published works, mostly online, that evaluate Internet search engines. Most of them, however, are either informal, focused on a few aspects, subjectively qualitative, or ad-hoc without a rigorous approach. In this work, we propose a formal mathematical model to evaluate and compare search engines. As a case study, five popular Chinese search engines are examined.
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