An Experimental Study on the Effect of Using the Wrongly Spelled and/or Pronounced Turkish Words on Web Search Engines

ABSTRACT: This study investigates how the Web search engines handle Turkish words which are frequently wrongly spelled and/or pronounced with their own particular wrong form(s). First of all, the three most popular international Web search engines Google, Bing, and Yahoo were selected, and a query list consisted of a set of such words with their incorrect forms was formed. All queries were run on the Web search engines separately and, at each run, every document retrieved in the first twenty was classified as “relevant” or “non-relevant”. Precision ratios and normalized recall ratios were calculated at various cut-off points. It seems that using incorrect forms affected the information retrieval effectiveness of the Web search engines in a negative way. Keywords: Web Search Engine, Turkish Language, Evaluation, Precision Ratio, Normalized Recall Ratio. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………