Hit count reliability: How much can we trust hit counts?

Abstract

Recently, there have been numerous studies that rely on the number of search results, i.e., hit count. However, hit counts returned by search engines can vary unnaturally when observed on different days, and may contain large errors that affect researches that depend on those results. Such errors can result in low precision of machine translation, incorrect extraction of synonyms and other problems. Thus, it is indispensable to evaluate and to improve the reliability of hit counts. There exist several researches to show the phenomenon; however, none of previous researches have made clear how much we can trust them. In this paper, we propose hit counts' reliability metrics to quantitatively evaluate hit counts' reliability to improve hit count selection. The evaluation results with Google show that our metrics successfully adopt reliable hit counts - 99.8% precision, and skip to adopt unreliable hit counts - 74.3% precision. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.