An evaluation of two commercial deep learning-based information retrieval systems for COVID-19 literature

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a tremendous need for access to the latest scientific information, leading to both corpora for COVID-19 literature and search engines to query such data. While most search engine research is performed in academia with rigorous evaluation, major commercial companies dominate the web search market. Thus, it is expected that commercial pandemic-specific search engines will gain much higher traction than academic alternatives, leading to questions about the empirical performance of these tools. This paper seeks to empirically evaluate two commercial search engines for COVID-19 (Google and Amazon) in comparison with academic prototypes evaluated in the TREC-COVID task. We performed several steps to reduce bias in the manual judgments to ensure a fair comparison of all systems. We find the commercial search engines sizably underperformed those evaluated under TREC-COVID. This has implications for trust in popular health search engines and developing biomedical search engines for future health crises.