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Software that finds things on the
internet, usually a dedicated website. One way or another, most web users
eventually find their way to one of the big names, such as google or
yahoo, because, though far from perfect, they are the only way of
finding information in the vastness of the internet.
The
reputation of search engines has been steadily diminishing almost from the
day that they first appeared, as it has become clear they are not up to the
immense job of indexing the web. This apparent shortcoming is not
immediately obvious to users, who seem to have the opposite problem : too
much information. Search engine indexes are now truly immense. Google,
comfortable the leading example of the genre, boasted an index of over
3billion pages at the beginning of 2003. Among all this data, even quite
complex and detailed searches can yield vast lists of sites with little
guidance on how useful each is likely to be. Most engines have no useful way
of determining the relevance of each occurrence of a word, so they simply
list them all according to the frequency with which they occur or how near
the top of the document they are. There are variations on this theme. Google,
for example, ranks sites according to how many other link to them, a
good indication of the regard in which they are generally held. But even the
best sites suffer from a plethora of broken and outdated links, which is a
source of frustration for users.
Some of these problems can be solved by increased horsepower and
improved application of information theory. One new line of investigation
involves the use of p2p technology to canvas search results and
bookmarks from other users on the network as part of the page ranking
process. But there are other problems to solve, too. Currently, many search
engines now focus more on marketing, advertising and strategic
partnerships than on the core technology. Most operate some sort of
keyword advertising scheme, in which adverts are displayed alongside the
list of search results. Some sell rankings to companies that pay to appear
at the top of the search list, raising doubts about their objectivity.
Others exclude potentially useful sites on the basis that they are in some
way competitive. Mean while, many companies now offer services to website
owners offering to optimise their search engine rankings; and unscrupulous
website owners and advertising networks have found a bewildering number of
ways to skew search results and fool the engines into displaying lowly sites
ahead of more popular or more useful ones, including techniques such as
pagejacking.
Consequently, an industry that started as a largely
philanthropic movement has become fiercely commercial and competitive, and
many of the original players have either vanished or been absorbed as part
of a steady consolidation process. Altavista, the king of the search
engines until 1999, was sold to rival Overture in early 2003 for a fraction
of its value at the time of its previous sale to Digital. |
