Type Of Search Engine example essay topic

Internet commerce is one of the fastest growing industries today. With the wide range of capabilities the web has it make it easier and cost efficient for businesses to make transactions with other businesses. One factor that allows businesses to find each other is search engines. Search engines are part of the reason the web is growing so rapidly. Search engines have many capabilities from using key words or phrases to find what you are looking for to using general statements to browse the web. But what exactly is a search engine?

Search engines are huge databases of web page files that have been assembled automatically by machine. There are two types of search engines. One type is the individual search engine. This type of search engine compiles its information on to its own database making it accessible when you use that particular engine. It does not use any other engine's information to help with your search. Then there are the meta-searchers which do not have their own databases.

They use a combination of individual search engine's information simultaneously, from a single site and using the same interface. Meta-searchers provide a quick way of finding out which engines are retrieving the best results for you in your search. There are two ways that Meta-searchers show their results. Most use a single list which display multiple-engine search results in a single merged list and had removed all the duplicate entries from the list. The second way that they display their results is through multiple lists. These are separate lists in which are displayed as they are received from each engine leaving the duplicate entries on the list.

Search engines are not very complex in the way that they work. Each search engine sends out spiders to bots into web space going from link to link identifying all pages that it can. After the spiders get to a web page they generally index all the words on that page that are publicly available pages at the site. They then store this information into their databases and when you run a search it matches they key words you searched with the words on the page that the spider indexed. However when you are searching the web using a search engine, you are not searching the entire web as it is presently. You are looking at what the spiders indexed in the past.

Spiders regularly return to the web pages they index to look for changes. When changes do occur, the spiders note the changes and index them to their database. However, the process of updating can take a while, depending upon how often the spiders make their rounds and how promptly the information they gather is added to the index. Until a web page has been both looked over by the spiders and then indexed into their database you won't be able to access the new information. Most of the search engines that are on the web today have many differences that are not that significant.

All of the search engines vary in speed, size, and content. Also no two search engines use the exact same ranking schemes. Each has its own method of ranking its search results. Another difference between search engines is not every search engine offers you exactly the same search options. Rankings of search engines all use different methods. Their goal is to return the most relevant pages at the top of their lists.

To do this, they look for the location and frequency of keywords and phrases in the web page document and occasionally in the html Meta tags. They look at the title field and then proceed to scan the headers and text near the top of the document. Some of them can tell the popularity of the site by looking at the number of tags that are attached to the site. So the more links that are attached to the page, the greater the popularity and value of the page.