SEARCH
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Internet searches can often lead to frustration and confusion. This
is largely due to the fact that the World Wide Web is composed of millions,
perhaps billions of individual Web pages. These pages are published
by both professional organisations as well as home entushiasts, all
with varying degrees of computer skills. In order to locate useful information
on the Web, it is important to understand how such engines work. Basically,
there are two main types of search engine:
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| (1) Web Crawlers | ||||
| These tend to be automatically maintained by 'spiders' that hunt down pages and categorise them according to the data within the HTML code. The information gathered by 'Crawlers' tends to be updated frequently, and dead links are usually removed quickly. | ||||
| (2) Indexes | ||||
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These consist of a number of categories, into which Websites have been placed. They tend to be extremely well ordered, with information usually being sorted by Humans into a logical hierarchy. Yahoo! and Anzwers are good examples of such systems. When doing a search, only sites within their infrastructure are examined - ie. they do not search the entire Web. A good strategy is to run your search through a multi-engine page such as Dogpile, savvysearch, search4free that will actually interface with a variety of Engines, and display the results accordingly. |
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