Comparative Analysis of Search Engine Usage, Relevance and Effectiveness among Final Year Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Globally, final year undergraduate students in universities carry out project reports as part of requirements for graduation. However, for meaningful project to be done in this era of Information and Communication Technology, there is need for them to make use of search engines which is synonymous today with Google in some clime. This paper examines the use of Web search engines by final year students to support learning and research in a Nigerian University. The frequency of usage of search engines, their level of satisfaction with search results, the effectiveness of the search engines as well as the relevance of results obtained by various search engines were investigated. The results showed that Google search engine was adjudged the best with highest frequency of usage and result retrieval outcome. Result from chi square test indicates that there is no significant relationship between gender, schools and relevance of results returned by the search engines