Browsing the Internet

I never paid attention that there was more to internet searches than using the default web browser. To search the internet you can either use computer software or use directories. "A human-compiled , hierarchical list  of web pages organized by category is called directory"(Shelly,Napier, Rivers). Basically it takes a broad category and narrows it down through use of a breadcrumb trail. These sub-categories narrow down to specific information.


The other form of performing a search is through search engines. These are software programs  use  a web crawler to search the internet for keywords. Different search engines can and will produce different results depending on popularity of the keyword , sponsored  listings and placement due to paid listings.


Finally, many search tools have become hybrids - basing their results on indexes created both by Web crawlers and human editors.(Shelly, Napier,Rivers).

One of the neat features is the ability to search web sites through multiple search engines or what is called metasearch engine"Metasearch engines  were developed to compile  the search results from multiple search engines into a single search result list"(Shelly, Napier,Rivers).




"The World Wide Web creates many new challenges for information retrieval. It is very large and
heterogeneous. Current estimates are that there are over 150 million web pages with a doubling
life of less than one year. More importantly, the web pages are extremely diverse, ranging from
"What is Joe having for lunch to day?" to journals about information retrieval. In addition to these
major challenges, search engines on the Web must also contend with inexperienced users and pages
engineered to manipulate search engine ranking function"(Ilpubs).

http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf

Web designers are trying to make web pages easier to navigate due to the fact that more users are coming online everyday. Social media is the method that will tie all this together and help users search the internet through connections and personal learning networks.

Image Courtesy of Google Images






Works Cited

Shelly, Gary B., Albert H. Napier, and Olilie Rivers. Discovering the Internet Complete Concepts and    Techniques. 3rdrd ed. Boston: Cengage Learning, 2010. 110-120. Print.


Page, Lawrence and Brin, Sergey and Motwani, Rajeev and Winograd, Terry (1999) The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web. Technical Report. Stanford InfoLab.


Images Cited


http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/michaeldb/michaeldb0906/michaeldb090600003/4956077-a-set-of-magnifying-glass-icons-to-search-the-earth-to-find-a-web-page.jpg