Search Engines are specialized programs that facilitate the retrieval of data from the Internet, on a business related network or on a personal computer system. They allow users to ask for contents meeting certain criteria usually involving a certain word or phrase, then gives a list of articles that matches those words or phrases. There are number of different engines that can be used for different types of searches and can be narrowed for optimal results.
Before the 1990¡¦s Search Engines were non existent. The first tool to be used for searching the Internet was Archie, which was created in 1990 by a student named Alan Emtage who attended McGill University in Motreal. Searches were achieved by downloading director listing of files on public FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites. This created a database of files for searching but could not search by file contents.
The first Web search engine was Wandex that was created by Matthew Gray at MIT in 1993, this no longer in exists. Another earlier search engine Aliweb created in 1933 still exists today. The first full text and widely know search engine was WebCrawler which was introduced 1994. Unlike previous search engines WebCrawler became the standard for all future search engines. It gave its users the option to search for any word on any webpage. Since then numerous search engines have became accessible on the Internet. The most popular with total market share and number of searches for April 2007 were:
Source: Nielsen/NetRatings, 2007
Search Engines # Of Searches April 2007 Market Share April 2007
Google 3,773,032 55.2
Yahoo 1,497,154 21.9
MSN/Windows Live 612,526 9.0
AOL 371,038 5.4
Ask.com 126,286 1.8
My Web Search 67,958 1.0
Comcast 35,239 0.5
Earthlink 30,0...
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...Google or anyone else unable to associate that data with the original user. Due to UE stringent privacy laws, search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN must find ways to satisfy these laws or face fines.
All search engines are different in some way. The best way to get optimal result is to choose the one that has the features that fits your search. The engine with the most pages in its database is not necessarily the best. You must conduct your search properly such as knowing key search words, avoid mistakes with spelling and use tools that are available such as specifiers for titles, images, links, etc. As search engines continue to evolve they will develop different ways of classifying information in different categories, and provide the search tools to take advantages of these changes. In order to optimize the use of these engines we must evolve with them also.
In “Google never forgets: a caution tale,” Max Fawcett (2006) has cautioned readers to be careful of what you publish on the Internet. In the first part of this essay, he mentioned about the internet makes the digital equivalent of a dishonest diary to record your life knowledge, your opinions, and your shameful stories. It is catastrophic when you can not control over the biography’s content. Also, Google can keep everything that you posted many years ago, and they are coming behind of you same as a shadow. In the second part, he tried to explain to us that some of the information in the Internet are fake, unclear and outdated. The author used from Napa Valley as an example that “superior code is also ruthlessly efficient at finding every reference, however obscure, tangential or dated it might be, when an individual’s name is searched.” The author also stated that he made a website in 1998 and after a while and specifically in 2004 he came to search for himself and he discovered that Google still has this information kept in its memory. He also tried to clarify that Google can be a reason for an employee’s termination or job refusing when his/her boss or interviewer search about their background and find some negative feedbacks on their weblog.
Is your privacy worth a better search engine? Steven Levy explains in his article, “Will You Let Them Store Your Dreams?” that search logs are preserved for future use and aren’t as anonymous as one thought. Internet users believed their searches were private, but are finding out the complete opposite is true. Steven Wyer’s article, “Life with Big Brother: Government Paws on Our Every Tweet” reveals the government is blatantly interested in people’s search logs and why. Levy and Wyer agree society’s privacy has been compromised while using social media formats; both writers use similar strategies such as language, logos, and pathos to sway the audience to their respective viewpoints.
By receiving this information, the webservers could sell it as part of an advertising database resulting in both electronic and paper junk mail. Legislative action has been enacted to curtail the illegal use of personal information.
Search engine industry is built on finding out and also aggresive advertising. As we know there are five major competitors in this industry competing with Google. The competition is strong because they are targeting the same market, presenting similar business and technologies. The five major competitors are Yahoo!, MSN, Baidu, Bing, and AOL.
The algorithms of search engines are as mysterious as the Force in Star Wars. Some claim to know everything there is and keeps up with the latest updates from Google and Bing, while others know the underhanded tactics that let them squeak by during the updates.
You can see that data can be pulled from users’ search history, browser history, online preferences, social and working connections, medical knowledge and all aspects of a persons’ life is gathered. The data can be shared with marketers, advertisers, researchers and government agencies. As such, the above habit raises eyebrows in regards to an infringement into the privacy rights of an individual (Daniel, 2009).
As the conclusion, the paper made good contribution to the field by describing the history of the information retrieval systems from 1945 to 1996 with abundant information on the various technologies developed, information retrieval systems built, and how they affected the research in information retrieval. I think artificial intelligence will start to play a leading role in information retrieval in the following years and one day we will have true question answering type of information retrieval at the finger tip of every Internet user.
In today’s fast paced technology, search engines have become vastly popular use for people’s daily routines. A search engine is an information retrieval system that allows someone to search the...
The ‘right to be forgotten,’ an integral component of the proposed reforms to the European Union data protection legislation, asserts an individual’s right to have personal information removed from the Internet. Mario Consteja Gonzalez, a Spanish national who ran into financial difficulties, brought the issue of the right to be forgotten on Internet searches to awareness. Gonzalez sold his property to resolve this predicament, and news of his economic state surfaced on the Internet. This damaged his reputation, decreased his job opportunities and led to loss of credibility. By demanding Google and other search engines to remove these links, Gonzalez ignited the debate about the importance of privacy in our digital era.
Search engines, specifically Google, have probably contributed more to the distribution of knowledge than any other invention since the creation of the printing press. Google was created by Larry Page and Serge...
Buncombe, Andrew. “Google resists demand to hand over search records.” 15 March 2006. The Independent.
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.
Exploring The Internet The Internet is like a network of networks where any computer can link up to information stored within it. It is accessed by a telecommunications line and a modulator-demodulator (MODEM). It is brought to your computer screen by converting analogue telephone signals into digital computer signals. There are many advantages and disadvantages on the Internet.
With the advancement of technology and the exponential increase of Internet use, professionals-academic and business-are relying on electronic resources for information, research, and data. The Internet gives an individual access to a sea of information, data, and knowledge; plus, this vast amount of information is available in a matter of seconds, rather than hours or days. The ease of access, availability, up-to-the-second timeliness, and vastness of online resources is causing many professionals, however, to forgo the use of print sources. Online resources are useful to conduct scholarly research and 'may be convenient, but they have shortcomings that make print sources necessary for submitting high-quality assignments' (Dilevko & Gottieb, 2002, ¶ 1).