Survey on Morphological Difficulties of Persian Language in Information Retrieval from Web Search Engines

This research investigated the difficulties which search engines are faced with in searching different forms of a word in the Persian language. A comparative survey and documentary method were used. Research population consisted of three international search engines (Google, Yahoo and AltaVista) which provide Persian Search capability. Studying Persian texts, a checklist was developed which consisted of 17 keywords each of which represented one of the Persian language challenges. Researchers input keywords in search tools and recorded retrieved results for each search engine. Results showed that none of the search engines considered linguistic challenges of the Persian Language. Furthermore, a significant relation existed between the form of words and the type of search engine.