week 4 (2b)

What is a search engine?

Internet search engines (eg Google, AltaVista) help users find web pages on a given subject. The search engines maintain databases of web sites and use programs (often referred to as "spiders" or "robots") to collect information, which is then indexed by the search engine. Similar services are provided by "directories," which maintain ordered lists of websites, eg Yahoo!, Lycos etc

How do search engines rate the stuff they find on the internet?

I don't know, tried to look for it on howstuffworks.com - couldn't find a thing. But I did find someone else's answer to the same question:
"Search engines are regularly updated by web crawlers or spiders, an automated browser that continuously scans the web for new web pages and extracting information from them. This information can be a word, a phrase or an entire section of the page. This information is then indexed into a database according to the words extracted from it, titles and other headers are often given special treatment. When a user types in a word the search engine scans this database or cache and finds a list of the web pages that best fit the word or words that were input by the user. Results are also graded on how many links to other sources relating to the topic it contains on its site."


(http://potterblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/week-4-blog-questions.html)

Who, or what, makes one page (that you might get in your search results) more useful than another one, so that it is put at the top of your search results?

I'll take a wild guess: a web master/ administrator and interpretation.


what are some of your favourite search engines? why do you like one more than others?

Google because it comes all languages and it translates. Lycos because that's the first search engine I've ever used.


Can you find some current news stories about search engines? (for example, Google has been in the technology news a bit lately).

I found an article about an Indian equivalent of google.

(http://www.domain-b.com/infotech/itnews/2007/20070524_stump.html)