Transcript Search Engines

Search Engines
Information
Technology
SIT
Course:3601
Wayne Shirley
Part 2 of lesson 1:
INTRODUCTION TO
THE INTERNET
Search Engines:
Yahoo
Excite
Altavista Inktomi
Lycos
Infoseek
Web Crawler
1) Those that Sort and Categorise and sometimes include
reviews or comments e.g. YAHOO.
2) Robotically-built index types such as LYCOS,
INFOSEEK, EXCITE and WEB CRAWLER.
The Robotic types(CRAWLERS) use special programs
called trawler, crawler, spider, robot, wanderer, worm or
similar name that scouts around the Web and returns its
findings. Information, such as each page’s location, title
and amount of text (which varies between crawlers) are
then stored on a publicly accessible searchable database.
This search engines are probably the best place to start for
any serious search. Web Crawlers generally search for key
words contained in a document. This indicates that your
search results depend on how much information a search
engine records when it gathers data from sites around the
world.
By entering ambiguous (non-specific) keywords to do your
search you can end up wading through hundreds of
irrelevant responses.
The trick is to NARROW DOWN THE SEARCH!
This can be achieved by using specific tools.
Help! All search engines offer assistance with a guide or
tutorial to the more advanced tools for narrowing down your
search.
It is very wise to take time to read these guides and tutorials
as an unfocussed search can be a very time consuming and
wearisome process.
“Quotation Marks”: By surrounding your words with
quotation marks your search will return results that have
those words in exactly the same order.
“Quotation Marks”: By surrounding your words
with quotation marks your search will return results
that have those words in exactly the same order.
For example: To find the ABC’s homepage you might
enter “Australian Broadcasting Commission” rather
than radio or television.
+ sign: A + sign before a word means not only does the
document have to contain previously indicated word(s), it
must also contain this word, but not necessarily next to the
other one or even in the same paragraph.
E.g: “Australian Broadcasting Commission” + policy
- narrows your search down further by indicating that you
wish to view pages with the ABC’s policies.
Excluding the + sign indicates that you would prefer the
document to have that word but it is not essential.
Don’t forget to use the online help specific to the use of
your search engine
Archie is one of the oldest file-search systems.
It periodically logs in to FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
servers, copies the public directory listings, and then
indexes the results.
The results are then stored in a searchable database and
made available on-line through an Archie Server.
When you enter a search request, Archie scans its
database and returns a list of files expressed as FTP
addresses.
Http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/archieplexform.html