Retrieving terminological information on the net. Are linguistic tools still useful?

In this communication we present a comparative evaluation of the effectiveness of search engines (SE) and linguistic tools (LT) to retrieve terminological information from the net, in the context of specialized translation tasks. For achieving that goal, an experiment with translators has been carried out. The results indicate that SE are more effective than LT in situations where the answer is partially ignored by the translator (i.e. the translator is hypothesizing one or several possible answers in the target language before searching). On the other hand, LT have not been either more appropriate in situations where the translator showed total ignorance of the possible answers before searching.