An Evaluation of Google Scholar and Scirus Search Engines Using Turkish Search Queries

Abstract

Due to the rapid growth of information on the Internet, search engines are used to getting information included in documents created in different languages. This paper aims to find out if the two search engines providing access to Open Access information sources, Google Scholar and Scirus, display the search results appropriately for special Turkish characters (ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş, ü) and to evaluate them on the basis of the total number of retrieved documents. Both search engines displayed the Turkish special characters correctly, but the search results differed. These differences create information retrieval problems for Turkish queries. Metadata of the Open Access Turkish information sources should be created using special Turkish characters and search engines should be developed to support them.