Libby Young
The two best known “facts” about the Internet are that most people are looking for sex online, and that finding what you’re looking for is very difficult. This, of course, could be true of life in general, but as with life these facts are not always as hard and fast as they seem.
For a glimpse of people’s online desires, the giant United States search engine Webcrawler has created the search ticker that allows you to watch as people around the globe type in their searches. While Pamela Anderson’s name is sure to appear if you watch for any length of time, perhaps the most surprising aspect of the ticker is the quest for non-carnal knowledge. People are looking for information on universities, hobbies, movies, games, news, health issues, jobs and, er, nude girls.
You can also expect to see typos galore and a variety of search techniques with searchers using Boolean terms, plus and minus signs and inverted commas in a seemingly haphazard way.
What is a search engine?
Search engines are powerful computers that use programs called “spiders” or “crawlers” to wander through the Web following links and feeding the details into the search engine’s index or catalogue. The spider revisits Web pages regularly to update information. Some spiders index entire pages, others read meta- tags (keywords, invisible to readers, inserted by the page’s creator) and others may only read the first few words. The search engine then sifts through all the pages in its index to match the terms in the user’s request and then ranks them according to relevance.
Of course, search engines don’t always get it right, but relevance is determined by the location and frequency of keywords on a Web page. Pages with the keywords in the title or in the first few paragraphs are likely to make it to the top of the list. Different search engines produce different results, depending on how many pages the engine has indexed, and individual criteria. Some engines use the popularity of sites as part of a ranking mechanism.
Search engines vs directories
A directory looks like a search engine, but it’s compiled by human researchers, not robots. This human factor sets a good directory like Yahoo apart from search engines.
Directories are likely to return much fewer results to any search than a search engine, but the content of the results is usually far better. Directories are also the better choice if you are researching a fairly broad subject. Some directories also supply site reviews that help in the quest for quality content.
Different search engines are dedicated to difference aspects of the Web. The best- known are dedicated to Web content, but if you are looking for mailing lists, e-mail addresses or Usenet groups, you’ll be better off with a specialist engine. For instance, DejaNews lets you search for a particular newsgroup on Usenet.