Search Engines.....

The Second part of Task 3 was to consider search engines.

To start, I thought I'd better find out what a search engine actually is. A Search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help locate required information stored on a computer system. So in this case, a web search engine helps locate information on the web. Search engines come in many different forms, they can be general searches like Google, or yahoo. Or they can be more specific engines for instance if you are looking to academic journals.

Search engines list the information that meet the criteria specified by the query is usually sorted in some regard to place the most relevant items first. This reduces the time required to find the desired the information. The information is usually ranked by page heading first, so whether the criteria is mentioned in the web page heading, then as the sites become less relevant the web pages are ranked by whether the information you are looking for is mentioned in the descriptions of the pages. but of course this could just be one word of your search criteria and of course would not be relevant for what you are looking for.

As I have been out of the study network for sometime, I rarely use search engines and if I do it tends to be yahoo or Google, just for ease really. So I can not really comment on which search engines are better for specific searches.

You can check out the following links for recent articles about search engines:


- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6505647.stm
- http://edition.cnn.com/2007/BUSINESS/11/05/google.mobile.ap/index.html
- http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/11/13/yahoo.china/index.html
- http://edition.cnn.com/2007/BUSINESS/11/01/google.stock.ap/index.html