Search engines – an introduction by Jerry Niebaum
What is a search engine?
Are you familiar with wikipedia?
www.wikipedia.org search engines
“A search engine or search
service is a program designed to help find information stored
on a computer system such as the World
Wide Web, inside a corporate or proprietary network or a personal
computer.”
What are some examples of search engines?
Suppose we use Yahoo to search for ‘search engines’.
1. Dogpile
Dogpile fetches and ranks results from multiple search engines,
letting you search for key words, pictures, audio, video, news, or phone
numbers from a single page. Filter results by language, date, or domain.
Category: All-in-One Search Pages
2. AltaVista
AltaVista provides web and newsgroup search
engines, as well as paid submission services.
Category: Internet Portals
3. HotBot
Search engine
that offers custom filters, skins, and access various other engines.
Category: Search Engines and
Directories
4. WebCrawler 
Metasearch results from popular engines and directories.
Category: All-in-One Search Pages
5. Lycos
Official site for Lycos, the online destination site
combining elements of navigation, community, and commerce.
Category: Internet Portals
6. AllTheWeb
Search engine
which indexes web pages, as well as multimedia, audio, FTP, PDF, and MS Word
files from around the world.
Category: Search Engines and
Directories
7. MetaCrawler
Search
service that relies on the databases of other search engines.
Category: All-in-One Search Pages
8. Google (Nasdaq:
GOOG)
Main site for the Google search engine,
finding web sites that match a user's query. Also includes Image Search,
Local Search, Google News, and Froogle.
Category: Web Search and Navigation Services
9. Yahoo! Search
Yahoo! Search helps users find information,
news, images, video, products, and local services from around the Web.
Category: Search Engines
> Yahoo!
10. Ask.com
onmouseover="pop(window.event,'','ask.com','Safe.','We've tested this site and found it to be safe.',"<a href='http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/ask.com/downloads?ref=safesearch&aff_id=0' target=_blank><img border = 0 src='file:///c:/program%20files/siteadvisor/scripts/safesearch/safe-facet-green.gif'></a>","<a href='http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/ask.com/email?ref=safesearch&aff_id=0' target=_blank><img border = 0 src='file:///c:/program%20files/siteadvisor/scripts/safesearch/safe-facet-green.gif'></a>","<a href='http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/ask.com/links?ref=safesearch&aff_id=0' target=_blank><img border = 0 src='file:///c:/program%20files/siteadvisor/scripts/safesearch/safe-facet-green.gif'></a>","116 green downloads","< 1 e-mail/ month","Links to green sites","<a class='sastyle_link_moreinfo' style='white-space:nowrap;color:#012D6F;padding-right:0.3em;' href='http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/ask.com?ref=safesearch&aff_id=0' target=_blank>More info...</a>","",'green','file:///c:/program%20files/siteadvisor/scripts/safesearch/','Ask.com',1.0)"
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The Ask.com search engine allows users to find
online information by asking a question, entering a phrase, or giving a key word.
Formerly Ask Jeeves.
Category: Ask.com
How do search engines collect their information? Back to wikipedia.
What is wrong with search engines?
Sometimes they give us too much information.
Consider for example using www.google.com
to search for Endacott Society.
Note that we get more than 25,000 links.
Now use www.google.com to search for
“Endacott Society” [with quotation marks].
This time we get fewer than 2,000 links by searching for a specific phrase.
Hint: Choose multiple unique keywords that produce fewer hits. Use quoted
phrases to help reduce the number of positive hits.
One of the most popular and successful Web search engines is Google at
But Google offers a wide variety of services beyond their search engine.
At Google check out:
Web Images VideoNew! News Maps
You can create a personal
account at Google, at no cost, for uploading videos.
An example of one of my
videos uploaded to Google is at: