This week, one of my tasks was to read four more articles to gain more of an understanding of my web designs pathway.
The first article that I read was called ‘web search engines: Part 1′ written by David Hawkings which he labels ‘the data processing miracle that characterises web crawling and searching’ and he also expresses how important it is that we have search engines to gather up data online. it also gives us an insight of more technical definitions used in web designs such as ‘crawlers’ which means linking around the web by following links from a seed, ‘hashers functions’ which is designed from a string of characters which is generated from a large set of strings such as URL’s, ‘indexes’ are identifications of crawled pages containing specific words, ‘infrastructure’ and ‘spamming’ which is web material designed to manipulate search engines for financial purposes.
The second article I read was ‘Web Search engines: Part Two’ which is the second part of David hawkings article. this article is more in depth about how things work such as real query processors and quality, how search engines have special techniques to speed things up. Caching is used to reduce costs of answering queries therefore stores HTML’s for the most popular queries and also how the data is structured to index the results faster by using the popular links at the top of a search engine’s results.
Another article I studied was written by Craig Knoblock based on the history of the web back in 1993 called ‘Searching the world wide web’ explaining to us what aliweb is; it requires the web server to prebuild an index of all the web pages on the server being used. it informs us about the importance of search engines have in connection to the internet as people couldn’t get good and high quality search results in the past. this article also talks about improvements what are happening in the near future (possibly the present now as some of these articles are slightly outdated) so they can get more accurate and relevant searches from the search engines used as soon as they are processed.
The final article I read was called ‘the overlap among major web search engines’ based on data collection, data analysis and research goals. it also talks about the similarities and differences between various search engines such as google, ask jeeves and yahoo; for example google and yahoo share 6.3% of searches whereas google and ask jeeves only share 2.2% of searches. Overall Yahoo is the most unique search engine as it has 105,635 unique results compared to ask jeeves and suprisingly, google being the least used search engine (according to this article). Dogpile.com was an old search engline launched in 1996 which is also spoken about in this article as it was the most popular search engine at that time. this search engine had a different view of the internet as it didn’t only use non-meta-search because that limits the user from receiving the best results for their query.
