Search Engines and Metasearch Engines

Basics• What is the Internet?• A massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It

connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet.

• What is the World Wide Web?• a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. It is

an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet. The Web also utilizes browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox, to access Web documents called Web pages that are linked to each other via hyperlinks. Web documents also contain graphics, sounds, text and video. The Internet, not the Web, is also used for e-mail, which relies on SMTP, Usenet news groups, instant messaging and FTP. So the Web is just a portion of the Internet, albeit a large portion, but the two terms are not synonymous and should not be confused.

The Internet Today

The link below shows graphically how large the internet is today and how large it will grow to be in the future:

Size of the Internet

10 Most Popular US Web Parent Companies

How many do you recognize?

So What Can We Get on the Internet?

Company websites

News, multimedia Nonprofit, charitable sites

Personal blogs, websites

And…

What’s Not Free on the Internet?

Not…

Copyrighted materials: Books, Poetry, Reference Works

Subscription databases

Research papers

And everything! People think “everything” is on the internet

Ahh, the Internet

The Good thing about the Internet – Anyone can post things to the Web, can Blog, can create a Wiki, anything

The Bad thing about the Internet – Anyone can post things to the Web, can Blog, can create a Wiki, anything.

Commercial on TV right now about believing everything on the internet http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7VOE/state-farm-the-internet-and-french-model

The Very Short History of Search Engines

Only 20 years!

Search Engines• First Internet search engine was Archie,

created in 1990 in McGill University• WAIS, Wide Area Information Servers were next

• Followed by Gopher, and Veronicaand Jughead

• Growth of the web meant the creation of Web directories and search engines but mostly titles were indexed.

• Web Crawler was the first full-text search engine in 1994.• Lycos was created in 1993 and was the first commercial

success.

Now?• Web crawlers (sometimes called spiders) follow links• Content is indexed from words on the page or provided by

meta-tags• A query is placed, and for a search engine like Google, a cache,

or copy of the page is presented. A search engine like AltaVista stores every word match against the query.

• Caching always saves the page the search term is on. This can be helpful if the page is updated and the search term is eliminated from the page. Because the term is still there it removes the possibility of “linkrot” when the term is no longer available.

Good Searching & Problems

• Each search engine searches differently• Always look to see if there is an advanced search option• Some search engines use proximity searching, which

allows users to define the distance between keywords

Look at the link below for information about search engines and their capabilities:http://lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/SrchEngCriteria.pdf

Rank and Bomb

Search engines are supposed to rank results based on either popularity or relevancy but many studies have shown other things going on. There could be political, economic or social biases. Companies can pay to advertise and get a higher ranking. Politically there could be search results that are removed because it violates local laws.

There is also something called Google Bombing which a web page is created with a large number of links to cause a page to have a high rank. An example is a 1999 Google bomb when a user would search “more evil than Satan himself” and it resulted in the Microsoft homepage!

Search Engines to Use in Class

In all but the last assignment, you may NOT use Google. The idea is that you learn and compare other search engines.

Here are the general search engines to use:• Bing• Blekko• DuckDuckGo• Hakia• Qunitura• Yahoo

Metasearch Engines• Metasearch engines are aggregators, sort of, of information

that may be in multiple or one search engine. In one search you will be able to search all the major sources instead of having to search each separately. One of the search engines even searches SlideShare and Wikipedia in their main search.

• This link explains how Metasearch engines work and why you might want to use them and add them to your Internet searching tool belt.

• http://www.internettutorials.net/meta-search.asp

Metasearch EnginesMetasearch engines are where you will find some of the more creative functions. For instance, iboogie sorts the results into subcategories, while blekko claims to have spam free searching.

Here are the metasearch engines to choose to use in your assignment:

• mrsapo• iboogie• ixquick• Mamma• Metacrawler• Zapmeta• Zuula

For more information about the chosen Search Engines and Metasearch Engines connect to this link:

http://www.internettutorials.net/engines.asp

I have checked all of the search engines and metasearch engines that I have given you to use for assignments. At the time of this creation, they all worked. However, looking at the link above may give you information about your chosen source if it isn’t working for you very well.

Readings• This link has several tutorials linked to it. I would look through

what Southern Oregon University has linked to their web site and glance through the tutorials for information. Depending on your familiarity and comfort with this topic you may need to spend more or less time. However, it is wise to look through them even if you are exceedingly comfortable searching because things on the web change by the moment. And really, how much time have you spent really learning about search engines and searching?

• http://hanlib.sou.edu/searchtools/howto.html