  Purpose - To test major Web search engines on their performance on
navigational queries, i.e. searches for homepages. Design/methodology/approach
- 100 real user queries are posed to six search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN,
Ask, Seekport, and Exalead). Users described the desired pages, and the results
position of these is recorded. Measured success N and mean reciprocal rank are
calculated. Findings - Performance of the major search engines Google, Yahoo,
and MSN is best, with around 90 percent of queries answered correctly. Ask and
Exalead perform worse but receive good scores as well. Research
limitations/implications - All queries were in German, and the German-language
interfaces of the search engines were used. Therefore, the results are only
valid for German queries. Practical implications - When designing a search
engine to compete with the major search engines, care should be taken on the
performance on navigational queries. Users can be influenced easily in their
quality ratings of search engines based on this performance. Originality/value
- This study systematically compares the major search engines on navigational
queries and compares the findings with studies on the retrieval effectiveness
of the engines on informational queries. Paper type - research paper
