Helpful Talk

An Internet search engine is an online information retrieval system that assists users in finding information residing on the World Wide Web. Users can generally start a search by typing key words. The results are usually sorted by relevance. Search engines use indexes to conduct searches quickly and efficiently.

Most search engines operate algorithmically or operate using a mixture of algorithmic and human input. Some search engines mine data in newsgroups, databases, or open directories.

Indexers:
Search engines such as AltaVista and Google index the contents of Web pages for free for the benefit of the Internet users who want to find information on the Internet. They send out web crawlers that are robot scripts that automatically crawl the internet, find, and retrieve web pages and add the information to their indexes. They find Web pages from by following links found on other web pages.

Directories:
Another type of search engines are Web directories. They are not real search engines, but most people think of them as search engines. Web directories are maintained by human editors who manage categories were all the websites are categorized. Web directories can be searched in a similar manner to search engines, and they return results that appear similar to search engines results.

Meta:
Meta Search Engines came along after the success of ‘key word’ search engines such as as Google. Meta search engines are not really search engines. Technically, they are search engines that feed off other search engines. A typical meta search engine accepts user queries just as a traditional search engine (ie. Google) but instead of searching key words in its own database, it sends those queries to other search engines, then based on the search results returned by mant search engines, it would select the best ones according to specific algorithms and disply the result set to the user.

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Ethan Search Engines Research