Search engines

• types
  • what they search
    • internet - Google, Yahoo Search, Goodsearch
    • enterprise - Grokker, Skyline
  • how they work
    • human driven - Skyline, ADI
    • robot driven - Google,
    • hybrid - Yahoo Search
• how they work
  • crawl for content
  • store content (meta tags, source code, and later queries and who used)
  • index content for retrieval (html, pdf, doc, xls, flash & images & ...)
  • searching
  • results presentation / PageRank related to what links to it (Austin, 2005, Berry, 2005)
• history
  • human driven 1990 archie, gopher, 1994 Yahoo, turned hybrid
• robot driven 1993 Aliweb, 1994 WebCrawler, Infoseek, Lycos, 1998 Google, 2004 Yahoo Search, 2006 Windows LiveSearch, Kartoo
• challenges
  • exponential growth (time to assemble an index 12 days/10B pages) and updated pages and secure sites (Google claimed 25B pages indexed)
  • keyword search creates false positives
  • dynamically generated pages or database driven content = hidden or invisible web
  • linkspam / attempts to inflate rankings

Shortcuts

Street maps, stock quotes, calculator, definitions, travel conditions, weather, numbers (flights, upc, area codes, patents, isbn/issn), phone numbers & addresses, find in a library

Search operators

• AND is always the default
• "" exact phrase (note: quotes & plagarism)
• ~ synonyms
• + must include
• - must exclude
• .. number range

Services

• services
• alerts
• catalogs
• Google Earth
• custom search engine
• Google Scholar (preferences)

Advanced search form (reverse engineering)

• advanced search form
• format
• domain
• safesearch
• display
• similar
• links

Tools for better searching

Google Hacks (book)
Gwiggle (online puzzle game)
Google Guide (website)