SEARCH ENGINES – AN INTRODUCTION
Search engine is an instrument of searching, are very popular and frequently used sites. This is why every ordinary user on the Internet, must have good knowledge about search engines and searching.
HISTORY OF SEARCH ENGINES
Search engines first emerged in the midst of 1990s when Google got fame as the best search engine in the entire world. Google was an
academic project of a couple of university students which was expanded and new technological features were incorporated to make it a better one. Today Google stands out as the most widely used search engine all around the world and the owners are making millions and billions of dollars each year.
DIFFERENT TYPES OF SEARCH ENGINES
Crawler-based search engines, such as Google, have a Web crawling software known as robots or spiders etc. The web pages crawled by these crawlers will be indexed in the search results.
Human-powered directories,such as Yahoo directory, depend on human editors to create their listings. Changes made to individual web pages will have no effect on how these web pages get listed in search results.
Meta-search engines, such as Meta crawler, transmit user-supplied keywords simultaneously to several individual search
engines to actually carry out the search. Search results returned from all the search engines can be integrated, duplicates can be eliminated and additional features such as clustering by subjects within the search results can be implemented by meta-search engines.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SEARCH ENGINES
Search Engines essentially act as filters for the wealth of information available on the Internet. They allow users to quickly and easily find information that is of genuine interest or value to them, without the need to wade through numerous irrelevant web pages. The goal of the Search Engines is to provide users with search results that lead to relevant information on high-quality websites. What this means is that the Search Engines provide users with the information they are looking for, and not necessarily the information that marketers would like them to see.
CHALLENGES FACED BY SEARCH ENGINES
- The web is growing much faster than any present-technology search engine.
- Many web pages are updated frequently, which forces the search engines to revisit them periodically.
- Some search engines do not order the results by relevance, but rather according to how much money the sites have paid them.
The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the results it gives back. While there may be millions of Web pages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others.