Search Engines

A "search engine" is a very broad term, and you will probably get different definitions depending on who you ask. I'm going to go with a relatively generic definitions: a resource that lets you search for information on the Internet. Search engines are critical to getting value on the Internet. If there wasn't an easy way to find information on the Internet, it would be sheer chaos. Imagine if you didn't have a TV listing for your cable stations, or if there was no way to search for books at the library. Search engines provide a similar guiding capability, the difference being that search engines are typically much more powerful.

Because content on the Internet is electronic, you have much more capable for searching it then you would at a library. If you want to find a book at the library, you probably step up to a terminal, type in a couple of words, and hope you find a book on that topic. How does the computer system find your book? It takes your keywords and compares them to a brief (2-line) summary and the title. You can also search by author and a few other criteria.

Search engines are different because you don't just search through summaries and titles of Internet content - you search the content itself. This provides you with much more power, and furthermore, you aren't ever searching a single "library" at any one time, but can search all Internet "libraries" at one time. There should be an obvious problem with this - too much information has its own problems. Imagine if you're looking for a book entitled "The story". Well, if you were searching all books in all libraries, including all of their content, you would obviously find millions of results. The phrase "the story" probably shows up countless times throughout all of the books of the world. Search engines combat this in two ways - they try to prioritize the order of the results so that the most likely and intelligent results are at the top. Furthermore, with portals, you can often find things a little more intuitively and directly, i.e. navigate to Recreation -> Literature -> Books -> Modern books -> Recent -> "The Story".

Being adept with search engines is the key to finding information on the Internet. Sure, you can pick one search engine that you like to use, but you'll find yourself complaining to people "I just can't find useful information on the Internet". Believe me, it's out there. Over the last several years I have located everything from recipe books to dictionaries to TV listings to ... Well, let me just reiterate that there is a huge amount of useful information on the Internet. The trick is in finding it, and presumably that is why you're reading this text.

Search engines come in two major flavors:

·         Web crawlers

·         Web portals

These two types of search engines compete for your attention and loyalty, and they are two different philosophies for finding things. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, and you should use the two to complement one another rather than arbitrarily choose one over the other simply because it is easier to use.