In week 3, we were told to do research for the 3 search facilities. They are the:

• Search engine
• Meta search engine
• Subject directory

Now from the results of my researches, i get to really know a lot more on these search facilities than before, and even how to enhance my output. It indeed benefited me a lot.

This is how search engine goes:

Search engine -

A search engine is a tool that enables users to locate information on the World Wide Web. It is a program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. Information sought may consist of web pages, images and other types of files.

Basically this is how you use the search engine:

1. The searcher types a query into a search engine.
2. Search engine software quickly sorts through literally millions of pages in its database to find matches to this query.
3. The search engine's results are ranked in order of relevancy.

One fine example of a search engine is: www.google.com

Typically, a search engine works by sending out a spider to fetch as many documents as possible. Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query.

This is the screenshot of what i got when i hit

" (Impact OR Effects) AND (computer) AND (crime OR offenses) AND ((businesses) OR (commerce) OR (industries)) " into the search column in google.com

Next to go,

Meta search engine-

Meta search engines are search engine tools that pass queries on to many other search engines and/or directories and then summarize all the results in one handy interface.

One useful example is www.metacrawler.com/

This is the screenshot of what i got when i hit

" (Impact OR Effects) AND (computer) AND (crime OR offenses) AND ((businesses) OR (commerce) OR (industries)) " into the search column in metacrawler.com

Subject directory-

Basically how a search directory works is to organize Web sites by subject, and is usually maintained by humans instead of software. The searcher looks at sites organized in a series of categories and menus. Web directories are usually much smaller than search engines' databases, since the sites are looked at by human eyes instead of by spiders.

1. The searcher types a query into the Web directory, or searches the Web directory's indexed categories.
2. The Web directory matches the searcher's query with relevant data from its index.

One example is http://dir.yahoo.com/

This is the screen shot of what i got when i hit

" (Impact OR Effects) AND (computer) AND (crime OR offenses) AND ((businesses) OR (commerce) OR (industries)) "



The most useful thing I learned is using the OR and ADD. They really produce more useful results when I use them!

another hit by agnes
11:28 PM