Search engines are designed to search for specific information located on the web and FTP servers. The results are displayed as a list of images, web pages, and other type of files.
Search Engine Elements
• Database Discovery-Search engines acquire information for their databases two ways: through authors and web programs. Authors, hoping to be accepted to listings, send in information to obtain exposure. Web programs such as “crawlers,” “robots,” or “spiders” roam the Internet seeking information and storing links to each page they visit.
The downfall for these agents is that they start with a historical list of links, most popular and best site lists, and follow the links found on these pages to add to the database. In turn, this makes most search engines biased towards more popular sites.
• User Search-A user search involves typing a few words or phrases into a search engine and then having the engine search for the occurrences of these words in its database. For example if user search online education it provide the best online college degrees. Each search engine has a specific way to decide spelling, variations, and truncation, along with which sites to retrieve. Most search sites also include a separate advanced search form that allows you to be more specific or to perform more complex searches.
• Presentation and Ranking-When processing a search, most search engines will find more site hits from a query than you could ever view. To help sort the results, the engine gives each document it retrieves a quality measurement called a relevant score that’s based on how well it matches the search query. Relevant scores are determined by the number of times a search term appears, where it appears (title versus in the document), and the location of all the search terms.
Common search engines include Lycos, Yahoo, Magellan, OpenText, Bing, Alta Vista, and InfoSeek.
Each search engine has its strong points. Check out search engine reviews online to help you determine which engine to use for your search to meet your specific needs.