E-Content of

INTERNET TECHNOLOGY AND WEB DESIGN

Chapter: 8.10 Search Engine and Meta Search Engine

Topic: 8.10.1 Search Engines

Search Engines

• The search engine is a web program that enables the users to enter words and
phrases to search, and scan the vast information on the web to locate sites that
matches the words or phrase.

• A web search engine is a software system that is designed to search for

information on the World Wide Web.

• The User can locate useful or interesting web sites by using a search engine.

• This is an organization with a web site containing a huge database of web site
addresses.

• Search engines also maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a

web-crawler.

• When a query is typed in form of subject or a name that describes what user are
seeking, and the search engine provides with a list or selection of web site
addresses that fit the enquiry.

• The User can then simply click on an address to jump to that website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing the visibility of a website

or a web page in a search engine's natural search results.

• It the process of optimizing the web page contents to increase its relevance to
specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search
engines.
• SEO makes the website more efficient and visible top its users during the search.

Web Search Engines

 E-Content of
INTERNET TECHNOLOGY AND WEB DESIGN
• A web search engine is an interactive tool that helps locate documents on the
internet containing terms being searched by the user.

• Search engines use the bottom up approach for finding your way around the
web.

• You give a search engine, a list of keywords of phrases (called a query) and it
returns to you a list of web pages that contain those words or phrases.

• In other words, search engines are actually databases that contain references to
thousands of resources.

• Users are able to interact with the database, submitting queries that “ask” the
database if it contains resources that match specific criteria.

• Some search engines search only the title of web pages, some by uniform
resource locator (URL), some by words in each document in a web site and
some by combination of these.

• Each search engine has its own way deciding which of the web pages on its list
is most likely to be one that you are looking for.

• Some allow more complicated queries than others, where keywords can be
combined with Boolean (logical) operations, such as AND, OR and NOT, to
produce rather complicated queries.

• The rules combining these operations are called the syntax of the search engine.

• There is an art in designing queries that result in the search engine returning a
useful list to you.

• Given the vast number of web pages, a query that is too general may field
literally millions of web pages, most of them useless to you.

• A query that is too specific may miss many web pages that you would have liked
to see.

• Each engine is also defined as an on line utility that quickly searches thousands
of web documents for a word or phrase being searched.
 E-Content of
INTERNET TECHNOLOGY AND WEB DESIGN
List of Search Engines

• Google

• Yahoo.

• Ask Jeeves.

• Duck Duck Go.

• Kosmix.

• Yebol.

• Bing

• Msn

FIG 8.6 : Search Engines

 E-Content of
INTERNET TECHNOLOGY AND WEB DESIGN

FIG 8.7: Search Engine Usage

Working of Search Engines

• Search engines are information retrieval system designed to help find information
stored on a computer system.

• There are many types of search engines but we would limit our discussion to
web search engines which search for information on World Wide Web.

• Search engine were started with an idea to ease the process of finding
information on the internet.

• A search engine consists of three parts.

• First part

 First part is the spider which is also called the crawler or bot.

 This spider part visits a web page, reads it and then follow links to other
pages within the site.

 This process is often referred to as 'Crawling' or 'Spidering'.

 Crawling of a website is done on the very regular basis. The spider visits a
website, following links from other website or website submission, it received.
 E-Content of
INTERNET TECHNOLOGY AND WEB DESIGN
 The content that spider finds is sent to its database or index as it is popularly
known.

 This index is like a huge book that contains a copy of web page or cache that
the spider finds out.

• Second part

 This constitutes the second part of a search engine. It also stores the
structure and the way pages are linked to each other.

 This information would be updated every time there is a change in content or

linking.

• Third part

 Third part of a search engine is search engine software that works behind the
interface when we use a search engine.

 This software will shift through the trillions on indexed pages to match the
search query that user has asked.

 The pages are ranked by search engines and the search results are based on
this ranking and relevance to search term.

 This is how a search engine determines what order shall be listed for a
particular search.
 E-Content of
INTERNET TECHNOLOGY AND WEB DESIGN
Chapter : 8.10 Search and Meta Search Engines

Topic : 8.10.2 Meta Search Engines

Meta Search Engines

• Meta Search Engine is a search tool that sends user requests to several other
search engines and/or databases and aggregates the results into a single list or
displays them according to their source.

FIG 8.8 : Meta Search Engine

 E-Content of
INTERNET TECHNOLOGY AND WEB DESIGN
• Meta search engines enable users to enter search criteria once and access
several search engines simultaneously.

• Search engines provide fast retrieval of information of interest from the web.

• The problem of knowing where search engines are how to use them poses some
difficulties.

• Furthermore, empirical results indicate that only 45% of relevant results will likely
be returned by a single search engine that is, each has a recall rate of 45%.

• This limitation is compounded by the fact that the coverage of a typical search
engine is between only 5% - 30% of the web.

• Meta search engines are designed to mitigate such problems by accessing

multiple individual search engines.

• The System architecture of a meta search engine that contains the following
components

 Query Interface Module – Responsible for getting user's query input.

 Dispatch Module – Responsible for determining to which search engines a

specific query is sent.

 Knowledge-based Module – Used by the Dispatch module to perform

decision-making (optional).

 Interface Agents Module – Responsible for interacting with different search

engines using different query formats.

 Evaluation Module – Responsible for ranking results according to some

predefined evaluation methods (optional).

 Display Module – Responsible for displaying results.

 E-Content of
INTERNET TECHNOLOGY AND WEB DESIGN

FIG 8.9 : The Architecture of Meta Search Engine

• Meta search engines operate on the premise that the web is too large for any
one search engine to index it all and that more comprehensive search results
can be obtained by combining the results from several search engines.

• This also may save the user from having to use multiple search engines
separately. The process of fusion also improves the search result.

Web Meta Search Engines

• A Web Meta Searcher also known as mega indexes is a tool that helps users
locate information available via the World Wide Web.

• Meta Searches do not have their own database. Instead they have access to
other primary search engines.

• Web Meta searchers provide a single interface that enable users to search many
different search engines, indexes and databases simultaneously.

• There are a number of web searchers available.

• The content of search engines, indexes and databases vary, the same query
typed into several search engines is likely to produce different results.
 E-Content of
INTERNET TECHNOLOGY AND WEB DESIGN
• When searching a topic, users often want to see results from various sources.

• One way to compare the results of several search engines is to type and retype a
query into individual search engines one at a time. This can be very time
consuming.

• A Meta searcher helps to make this task more efficient by providing a single
interface where the query is typed in one and results can be obtained from
multiple search engines.

• Meta searchers are different from other search engines and indexes in the
following respects.

• Single search engine and indexes provide a collection or database of resources

that can be queried.

• Meta searchers do not provide a database i.e., these search engines do not
collect web pages, do not accept URL and do not classify or review web sites.

• Instead they provide service to search the database of several other search
engines at the same time to locate web pages that matches query given by the
user.

• Example of web meta searchers include

 All in one search

 clnet

 Cyperlands Web

 CUSI

 Electric Library

 Eureka

 Savvy Search

 ProFusion

 MetaCrawler