Internet-based information and retrieval systems

There is limited reliability of internet-based information systems. For example, Internet search engines provide results that have limited reliability and data available on the Internet is limited in its reliability. As a result, the purpose of this paper is to elicit sources of the lack of reliability, develop a model that can be used to study the impact of reliability and propose some solutions to mitigate reliability issues. The model couches Internet data as an "intermediary report." For example, use of a search engine will generate an intermediary ''report'' providing a list of relevant universal resource locators (URL) and a corresponding brief description that may or may not correctly describe the label being searched. This "report" structure is used to model Internet information and retrieval systems as an intermediate step between users of the system and the original or expected information. The basic model of information relevance in the information retrieval process is reviewed, when the precision is a function, in part, of the recall and fallout rate. Reliability is found to have an impact on precision and fallout rates. Alternatives are proposed to mitigate the impact of this lack of reliability. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.