Internet Search Engines

Internet Search Engines

One of the most exciting things a user can do on the Internet is to search for information from multiple sources. There are hundreds of millions of web pages available, containing information on a wide variety of topics. There is no single catalog maintained (similar to a library) that lists all the web pages and their information. The user needs to search the Internet to find the information relevant to his/her requirement. Internet Search engines or Search engines are specific web sites that help the users to find information stored on the Internet. Search engines search the Internet based on some important words (keywords) or combinations of words. Some of the common and well - known search engines are
www.google.com, www.lycos.com and www.yahoo.com

Using the Search Engine

The user uses the search engine as follows:
• Enter the address of search engine, for example www.google.com
• Enter the word, or combinations of words, or symbols with words, based on which the Internet is to be searched. Some options for searching are :

Working of Search Engine

The search engines work as follows:
• Search engines maintain a data repository of words along with the URL’s at which these words are found.
• When the user uses the search engine to search for a word or group of words, the search engine checks its data repository and returns a list of URLs that satisfy the search.
• To narrow down the scope of search, the search engines also provide different criteria for search. For example, some of the search criteria provided by Google search engine are Images, News, and Scholar to search for images, news, and published papers, respectively.
• Sites like www.msn.com are metasearch engines. Such sites do not maintain their own data repository, but send the search request to other search engines. The search results are collected from different search engines and displayed to the user.