Access to electronic commerce sites on the World Wide Web: an analysis of the effectiveness of six Internet search engines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The success of electronic commerce (e-commerce) sites that cater to online shopping is dependent upon a number of factors, such as the quality, variety and price of their products, their guarantees, return policies, etc. The success of these sites is predicated upon the more basic assumption that consumers can actually find the sites on the World Wide Web. A major advantage of online shopping is that it enables consumers to engage in comparison shopping with an ease that cannot be replicated easily in the physical world. This paper examines the ways in which six Internet search engines facilitate access to online shopping sites via their hierarchical subject directories. Specifically, the paper examines the internal structure, consistency and orientation of the six subject directories. The findings indicate that the search directories (i) use ambiguous and sometimes misleading categories to organize e-commerce sites, (ii) are only moderately consistent in the way they organize e-commerce sites and (iii) provide relatively few opportunities for comparison shopping.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.046 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".