06-08-2011, 02:52 PM
ABSTRACT
A web search engine is a program designed to help find information stored on the World Wide Web. Search engine indexes are similar, but vastly more complex that back of the book indexes. The quality of the indexes, and how the engines use the information they contain, is what makes or breaks the quality of search results.
The vast majority of users navigate the Web via search engines. Yet searching can be the most frustrating activity using a browser. Type in a keyword or phrase, and we're likely to get thousands of responses, only a handful of which are close to what we looking for. And those are located on secondary search pages, only after a set of sponsored links or paid-for-position advertisements. Still, search engines have come a long way in the past few years.
Although most of us will never want to become experts on web indexing, knowing even a little bit about how they're built and used can vastly improve our searching skills.
This paper gives a brief introduction to the web search engines, architecture, the work process, challenges faced by search engines, discuss various searching strategies, and the recent technologies in the web mining field.