Quality dimensions of Internet search engines

Searching for information from the Internet today has been made easier by the widely available search engines. They will become more and more important for our daily life as our society enters the information age. However, there are many search engines and their number is increasing. It is of considerable importance for the designer to develop quality search engines and for the users to select the most appropriate ones for their use. In fact, most search engines are developed mainly for better technical performance and there could be a lack of quality attributes from the customers’ perspective. In this paper, we first provide a brief review of the most commonly used search engines, with the focus on the existing comparative studies of the search engines. Then, the quality dimensions of Internet search engines are viewed, based on a SERVQUAL framework, as it is important to look at quality from the customers’ points of view. A list of important quality expectations by customers is identified and grouped into five quality dimensions using the SERVQUAL model. The customer expectations identified in this paper will be of great help not only to the designers for improving the search engines, but also to the users for selecting suitable ones.