World Wide Web Search Engines

Abstract

The World Wide Web now holds more than 800 million pages covering almost all issues. The Web’s fast growing size and lack of structural style present a new challenge for information retrieval. Numerous search technologies have been applied to Web search engines; however, the dominant search method has yet to be identified. This chapter provides an overview of the existing technologies for Web search engines and classifies them into six categories: 1) hyperlink exploration, 2) information retrieval, 3) metasearches, 4) SQL approaches, 5) content-based multimedia searches, and 6) others. At the end of this chapter, a comparative study of major commercial and experimental search engines is presented, and some future research directions for Web search engines are suggested.