INTERNET SEARCH ENGINES

One of the most fascinating developments of the World Wide Web (www) is the ability to conduct research from your desk top without visiting a nearby library. This is even more true in the developing world, where public libraries are hard to find. In the past, most students had to rely on outdated text books and lectures by instructors to conduct research. The Internet has changed all of this within the last decade. There are now literally thousands of e-books, articles, newspapers and scholarly journals on every subject imaginable on the net. The underlying problem is how you acquire this information without the necessary background in computers. Basically, you don’t have to be a computer guru or subject matter expert to conduct research on the net.

Large databases of web pages files known as SEARCH ENGINES make it possible to manage information from the internet. Once a search is conducted, the results could be a list of categories or subcategories and full text documents. Simply stated, search engines provide links to web sites containing most information a user is looking for. These lists are commonly referred as hits and depending on area of interest, you can make a selection of hits found to match your topic. You may be wondering how developers of search engines make money. A lot of search engines are supported by advertisers. Advertisers pay money in order to have their listings ranked higher in search results. Other search engines make money by running advertisements alongside the result of the search engine.

There are over a hundred search engines on the Internet. However, some are more user friendly than others. One thing to remember is that search engines do not directly search the web. Every search engine searches a database of WebPages that it has copied and stored. Therefore when you use a search engine, you are searching a stored copy of the real web page and then retrieve the most current page by clicking on the link. It is also worth noting here that, search engines databases are built by computer robot programs known as spiders. These spiders crawl the web looking for pages to include in their database.

Here is a listing o f the most popular search engines based on recent surveys.
Google. http://www.google.com

Google was launched in 1998 and rose to prominence in 2000. It represents the most comprehensive collection of web pages on the internet and consists of more than 1 billion URL’s (uniform resource locator) internet address, e.g. http://www.ecotelacademy.org/programs.html

Yahoo. http://www.yahoo.com

Yahoo provides results that are arranged in relevant subject categories followed by web sites and individual sites. Yahoo.com was launched in 2004.

A few other top search engines are:

http://www.ask.com
http://www.exalead.com
http://www.viewzi.com
http://www.info.com
http://www.infoseek.com
http://www.altavista.com
http://www.alltheweb.com
http://www.msn.com