Sunday 12 October 2008

Blog Questions for Week 2

There are three parts to this question:

a) Describe how the
www.Yahoo.com search engine works and give one advantage and one disadvantage in this method of searching?
b) Describe how the
www.Google.com search engine works and give one advantage and one disadvantage in this method of searching?
c) In your view explain which search engine you prefer to use when searching the web and justify why you have this preference?



Yahoo uses a Hybrid Search Engine, which uses crawler-based results and human-powered listings. Google uses a Crawler-based Search Engine alone.

Hybrid search engines may favour one type of listing over another, such as prioritising human-powered listings from a certain resource over any other. This means the most relevant results may not be listed as the tope results. The human-powered listings are found through matching keywords in the webpage description, this allows it to have certain keywords in the description that are relevant to the content but may not be within the page. Changes to website won’t change the listings and a good website is more likely to be reviewed for free over a poor website, regardless of content. It is easy to navigate but only a small amount of the web is catalogued.

Crawler-bases search engines ‘crawl’ or ‘spider’ the web and people search the findings. Changes to web-pages can affect the listings based on page titles, body copy and other elements. This means that the listing of results will be based upon the relevance of content on the page. An index of web pages is generated by going from one webpage to another via links and can be ranked on how many links go to the page; this may cause lower priority on web pages with less links regardless of the relevant content.

I prefer to use Google because it is simple to use and after many years of using it to search for web pages and images it has been very reliable.


Content references;

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2168031
How Search Engines Work, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Watch, Mar 14, 2007

http://www.webinformers.com/search_yahoo_main.cfm
http://www.webinformers.com/search_google_main.cfm
Search Engines, Web Informers ©2005

http://www.monash.com/spidap3.html
How To Use Web Search Engines, Linda Barlow, Monash Information Services, Nov 05, 2004

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