Search and Meta Search Engines
Search and Meta Search Engines
A search engine is a complex program that searches documents containing a specified set of keywords. A search engine basically works in three phases:
1. The search engine sends a program (called the spider) that searches the web pages in the Internet for the keyword.
2. After the spider fetches the result, another software called the indexer reads these results. The indexer then creates an index based on the words contained in each of the documents returned by the spider.
3. After indexing, the search engine presents only the documents matching the search criteria to the user.
The relevance of the result returned by the search engine depends on how you frame the query. To search any information, connect to any of the search engine websites like: www.msn.com, www.google.com, www.webopedia.com, www.yahoo.com and follow the points mentioned below:
1. Enter the keywords of the topic for which the search is required in the input box. For example, if a search is required on population then enter the keyword as “Population” or “population”
2. Search for the phrase is done by entering the phrase within the double quotes. For example, if the search is required on declining sex ratio then the keywords can be entered as: “declining sex ratio.”
3. Notice that the phrase to be searched has been given in double quotes. If double quotes are not entered then search will be made for individual keywords. Any document containing any one of the keywords will be returned.
4. The search can be made simultaneously for more than one word by placing a space or ‘OR’ within the keywords.
5. If a search is to be made for a set of words in a desired sequence then these set of keywords can be given in double quotes.
The Metasearch Engine Architecture
User Interface: The user interface of the Metasearch Engine is similar to the look and feel of the individual search engines like Google and Yahoo. It even has options to search on the basis of types and categories and also of which search engines it must use to write back the result.
Dispatcher: The dispatcher has the work of query generation.
Display: The display uses the queries to write back the results on the screen. It uses methods such as page ranks, parsing techniques, cluster formation, and stitching to give the desired result.
Personalization: The personalization in other words is being user-specific. This involves comparing the results with each other.