1.3 Focus, goals and structure of the report

The focus of this work is to show if there are some risks of being search
engine dependent and if there are some, is the gap of information significant
between a search engine to another?
Goals are numerous:
· to put in evidence how bad it is to be dependent of an unique search engine;
· to show how important it is to have reliable information;
· to show how big is the gap between a general search engine and a specialized
one;
· to look for alternatives if tomorrow the main search engines disappear;
· to show the weaknesses of general search engines;
· to show and discover other search engines and put in evidence their
usefulness;
· to show that general search engines are not well used;
· to discover the future expectations people have regarding search engines and
what are the coming technologies in this field;
The structure of the report should be done as follow:
The first idea is to introduce the concept of data quality. We all go on
search engines in order to find information whatever it is or at least to find the
answer to one of our question (how much does a Paris-Berlin train ticket costs? What
is the weather in New York? What is the last result of our favorite soccer team?).
The second point is about Data quality which is very interesting in order to
understand why search engines exist.
The next point is dealing with the world of search engines and the
dependency which is outcome from them.
Analyzing the world of search engines is fundamental to understand how
Internet is not as rational as we could think (search engines may be not the Internet,
search engines may be different from a country to another).
Then we will have a look on figures which show quite clearly that people are
not using several search engines when making research on the Internet but an unique
one that I will define as the dependency concept.
Once this definition given I will focus on the heart of this work which are the
risks that this dependency provide and its influence on data quality.
Google being in Europe the most used search engine I will use it as a major
example in my last part.