Survey and evaluation of web search engine hit counts as research tools in computational linguistics

作者：

Highlights：

• We conduct an exhaustive and up-to-date survey of web search engines.

• We evaluate the hit counts provided by web search engines from a research perspective.

• We assess the accuracy, mathematical coherence and temporal consistency of hit counts.

• We identify the web search engines whose hit counts are best suited for research.

摘要

•We conduct an exhaustive and up-to-date survey of web search engines.•We evaluate the hit counts provided by web search engines from a research perspective.•We assess the accuracy, mathematical coherence and temporal consistency of hit counts.•We identify the web search engines whose hit counts are best suited for research.

论文关键词：Web search engines,Hit counts,Computational linguistics,Information distribution,Semantic similarity

论文评审过程：Received 24 May 2017, Revised 14 December 2017, Accepted 19 December 2017, Available online 20 December 2017, Version of Record 5 January 2018.

论文官网地址：https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2017.12.007