Quality of search engines: how good is Google pagerank?

Owing to the increasing use of the Internet for diverse applications, information retrieval has become a major research issue. Google, the largest search engine worldwide, utilizes its own PageRank algorithm to calculate the relevance of websites. This study proposes a practical method based on Information Retrieval Ratios (the Recall, Precision and Available ratios) to evaluate the validity of PageRank for measuring search engine quality. Analytical results reveal that correlations between PageRanks and information retrieval ratios in the search results of web pages in Traditional Chinese are not significant ( p > 0.05 in each case). This study concludes that PageRank is not a useful indicator of the relevance of results in Traditional Chinese search engines. Therefore, Google needs to enhance its PageRank algorithm.