• Journal of Information Management
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.50-70
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• 2000

Since the contents of internet resources are beginning to include texts, images and sounds, different Web-based image search engines have been developed accordingly. It is a fact that these diversities of multimedia contents have made search process and retrieval of relevant information very difficult. The purpose of the study is to compare and evaluate its special features and performance of the existing image search engines in order to provide user help to select appropriate search engines. The study selected AV Photo Finder, Lycos MultiMedia, Amazing Picture Machine, Image Surfer, WebSeek, Ditto for comparison and evaluation because of their reputations of popularity among users of image search engines. The methodology of the study was to analyze previous related literature and establish criteria for the evaluation of image search engines. The study investigated characteristics, indexing methods, search capabilities, screen display and user interfaces of different search engines for the purpose of comparison of its performance. Finally, the study measured relative recall and precision ratios to evaluate their electiveness of retrieval under the experimental set up. Results of the comparative analysis in regard to its search performance are as follows. AV Photo Finder marked the highest rank among other image search engines. Ditto and WebSeek also showed comparatively high precision ratio. Lycos MultiMedia and Image Surfer follows after them. Amazing Picture Machine stowed the lowest in ranking.