grossly inefficient. Today there are approximately 3,200 search engines which handle about 150 million searches (hits) each day.
Did you ever stop to wonder how search engines work? Or are you as clueless as I was until I did research for this article. From the beginning, search engines have used software agents to find and index sites as quickly as they appeared. That software also matched far-flung Web pages with the keywords typed into the search box. Can you even imagine the vast amount of work done by computer whizzes to create this software? It boggles my mind.
Experts calculate that the number of Web pages has been doubling every eight months. Due to the incredible success of the Web, new problems continue to surface. Industry critics chastise search engines for missing thousands of new Web sites as well as for producing search results with far too many out-dated links.
To deal with the new problems caused by the inordinate growth, it became necessary to consider the way people search. Typically, a surfer enters a single keyword, says a prayer and hits the search button. One single, specific search may produce 1,000 results which tend to make a search overwhelming and frustrating. At this point, it is necessary to refine a search by adding keywords or trying new terms.
Due to mounting problems, search engineers have concluded that the solution is not in indexing more pages. Rather, they have decided to rely on combining human judgement with the machine. The popular search engines are injecting more people power to do the mind reading which directs the searches. AskJeeves prods people to narrow queries by picking from a list of questions and answers written by the company's employees. At NorthernLight, librarians constantly fine-tune their directory structure and come up with names of categories used for sorting Web sites. DirectHit analyzes what people have clicked on during |
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previous searches and provides searches with the most popular results. Google is working on a process of link analysis which gives a numerical rank to Web pages based on the number of times those pages are linked from an authoritative Web site. (An authority is a Web site that ranks especially high in Google's rankings.)
Pure scientists are reluctant to accept human assistance, as they are convinced that human bias most certainly is introduced, and they opt for "artificial intelligence" to read people's minds. But in spite of progress, that is a long way down the road. Information scientists believe too much people involvement creates "the tyranny of the majority." They say that search engines that rely on analysis of links and clicks may not be very useful just because a site is popular (by number of visits). In essence, scientists are working for the day that the computer will analyze a Web document, without human interference, and instantly understand what the document is about. To this end, experts in computational linguistics at LexiQuest have recently demonstrated Web-based software which, when told "I want to book a room," understood it as a search for lodging and when told "I want to buy a book" returned results with online bookstores.
Lisa Guernsey-NYT
Ed. Note: Amazing!
Yahoo, About.com, AskJeeves, Google, NorthernLight, AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, HotBot and Go.com are a few of the favorite search engines. If you have one or more favorites that you wish to share with other club members, please e-mail me: jeanhvl@aol.com.
Netscape Communicator
When browsing, you can go back one page without using the mouse: Simply press Alt-left arrow. To go forward, pressAlt-right arrow.
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