Search engine
According to Wikipedia, “A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system, such as on the World Wide Web, inside a corporate or proprietary network, or in a personal computer. The search engine allows one to ask for content meeting specific criteria (typically those containing a given word or phrase) and retrieves a list of items that match those criteria. This list is often sorted with respect to some measure of relevance of the results. Search engines use regularly updated indexes to operate quickly and efficiently.” ([1], accessed 17:33, 26 January 2007 (MET))
How to improve your search results
Do you always find what you were looking for when using a search engine? Many search engines find a huge amount of matches, but often one does not get what one wanted to find. On the Webreference webpage you can find many tricks that can be useful to improve the quality (and the result, of course!) of your search. The first thing you can do to improve your search results is: think about what you are looking for and be as much precise as possible about your search terms. It is more useful to put only few words-or even better keywords- and to make “title only” searches, than looking for many search words at the same time. The broadest your search, the higher the possibility of coming up with unwanted results. This tip alone can help you save time and find more practical results. Another thing you can do is: refine your searches. Even though this can really make a great difference in the amount (and quality) of pages returned, a BBC article argued that only 10% of people refine the results. Use the “advanced search” option that many search engines offer you. In fact, just specifying the language you want your results to be, you will avoid getting many useless matches. If you still don’t find what you were looking for following these tips, try being more technical. Boolean terms are a bit harder to use, but they can help you to narrow your search results. To get Boolean logic, just use the words AND, NOT, and OR. This type of search also gives one the possibility of eliminating unwanted matches by using the AND NOT operator. Moreover, keep in mind that search engines are very different, and that they offer one different services. Search engines have been tested to help one find the right search engine according to what one is looking for. Knowing which is the right one according to your tasks is a further way to help you achieve better matches. A table that clearly illustrates which search engine you can use when can be found on the Webreference page. However, an article that appeared on the BBC webpage argues that it is much better “to become as familiar as possible with one search engine and stick to it”. This comes from the fact that a study that was carried out found that “of 600 queries 60% of results returned for a particular set of terms will be the same across all search sites”.
Most used seach engines
According to Darren Waters, technology editor of the BBC News website, Google is “the world's most popular search engine.” It has been argued that its dominance of the search market, which is said to stand in the UK at 75% (followed by MSN and AskJeeves, both on 8.4%, and Yahoo with 8%), is due to the fact that Google has become an habit. In fact, Mr Elliott said that "it isn't much trouble to go to another but people increasingly have Google on their browser window and even for those that type it in each time it has become a habitual thing." It has never been proved that Google has better results than other search engines. On the contrary, Webreference, for example, tested many search engines following these parameters: “One Item Among Many Related Pages”, “Obscure Item”, “Selectivity: Apple trees NOT computers”. On the basis of these tests, it appeared that “ Lycos is the official heavy weight search engine champion of the universe”, even though, according to this webpage, it is better to “choose different engines for different tasks.” Mr Elliot supports this idea, arguing that “people are unreasonably attached to Google and the issue is that people are not experimenting with other products.” Nowadays other search engines have been trying to break the so-called “Google habit”, like Ask, WebFetch and its sister search engine in the US DogPile. Even though their position in the search market is still very limited, Jane Wakefield argued that “the movement to persuade users away from the dominant search engines such as Google and Yahoo may be small but it is gathering momentum from those with more solid radical credentials.”
The future of search
The future of search seems to look bright: many search engines have in mind to develop ambitious projects to make their service better and better. Let’s see some. According to Mr Merrill, the company Google is planning to expand activity very much in the future. Its projects include better search for mobiles, personalised search, language translation (something has already been done on mechanised translation), accessing offline information and defeating web spam, instant messaging and online mapping. Moreover, according to Spencer Kelly, Google “is also hoping to build on its online music radio service, Launchcast, which includes a personalised music selector that learns the types of music you like and streams you different tracks accordingly.” He adds that, as regards videos, Google “is planning a service that allows you to search transcripts and plotlines for videos stored on the web, and watch them.” According to what he says, as regards Yahoo, if you “create a Yahoo user ID and you not only get free e-mail, but you also get a chance to create your own homepage, to which you can add your own elements: calendar, e-mail inbox, news stories, weather, change the colour scheme, etc.” This way, your web interface is going to be really like you want it to be. The tendency seems to be that in the future, search engines will be even more personal. We are not only talking about personalised homepages, but even your search options will be personalised. According to Jane Wakefield, Jimmy Wales, founder of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia wants to offer an alternative "people-powered" search engine. She said that “his plan is to Wiki-fy the process of internet search, so that human beings decide openly how to rank and organise information, not the huge private servers of Google and Yahoo.” Jimmy Wales called this ambitious project "Search Wikia", saying that it will be "the search engine that changes everything".