World Wide Web Search Engines Research Articles

A survey of alternative designs for a search engine storage structure

Three information retrieval storage structures are considered to determine their suitability for a World Wide Web search engine: The Wolverhampton Web Library — The Next Generation. The structures are an inverted file, signature file and Pat tree. A number of implementations are considered for each structure. For the index of an inverted file a sorted array, B-tree, B+-tree, trie and hash table are considered. For the signature file vertical and horizontal partitioning schemes are considered and for the Pat tree a tree and array implementation are considered. A theoretical comparison of the structures is done on seven criteria that include: response time, support for results ranking, search techniques, file maintenance, efficient use of disk space (including the use of compression), scalability and extensibility. The comparison reveals that an inverted file is the most suitable structure, unlike the signature file and Pat tree, which encounter problems with very large corpora.

Searching the Web for science

Elsevier Science, publisher of many scientific journals, has launched a science-specific World Wide Web search engine, Scirus.com. In addition to searching across information that is freely available on the Web, the engine also takes in contents from the Elsevier information resources ScienceDirect, BioMedNet and ChemWeb. The search currently includes more than 60 million pages, notably incorporating portable document format (PDF) and postscript format documents. Scirus also includes specialized linguistic search algorithms designed to identify scientific content and thereby provides a more targeted search. Discussions are ongoing regarding the inclusion of material from other publishing houses on the site. http://www.scirus.com D.S.

Evaluating the Source and Content of Orthopaedic Information on the Internet

The Internet has become a popular source of medical information for patients. Authors of health-related web pages are not required to adhere to any standard for medical content or accuracy. The goal of the present study was to assess the type, quality, and reliability of information about carpal tunnel syndrome that is available on the Internet. The search phrase "carpal tunnel syndrome" was entered into five commonly used World Wide Web search engines. The search results then were given as an ordered list of universal resource locators, or web-site addresses. The top (first) fifty web sites from each of the five searches were combined to create a master roster of 250 web-site addresses. These web sites then were evaluated for authorship and content, and an informational value score ranging from 0 to 100 points was assigned to each. Thirty-three percent of the sites sold commercial products for the evaluation or treatment of carpal tunnel syndrome. An additional 30 percent were commercial web sites that did not sell products. Only 23 percent of the sites were authored by a physician or an academic organization. Fewer than half of the sites offered conventional information. Twenty-three percent of the sites offered unconventional or misleading information. The mean informational value of the web sites was 28.4 of a possible 100 points. The information about carpal tunnel syndrome on the Internet is of limited quality and poor informational value. The public and the medical communities need to be aware of these limitations so that the quality of medical information available on the World Wide Web can be improved.

ADMIRE: an adaptive data model for meta search engines

Considering the diversity among search engines, efficient integration of them is an important but difficult job. It is essential to provide a data model that can provide a detailed description of the query capabilities of heterogeneous search engines. By means of this model, the meta-searcher can map users' queries into specific sources more accurately, and it can achieve good precision and recall. Moreover, it will benefit the selection of target source and computing priority. Because new search engines emerge frequently and old ones are updated when their function and content change, the data model needs good adaptivity and scalability to keep in step with the rapidly developing World Wide Web. This paper gives a formal description of the query capabilities of heterogeneous search engines and an algorithm for mapping a query from a general mediator format into the specific wrapper format of a specific search engine. Compared with related work, the special features of our work are that we focus more on the constraint of/between the terms, attribute order, and the impact of logical operator restraints. The contribution of our work is that we offer a data model that is both expressive enough to meticulously describe the query capabilities of current World Wide Web search engines and flexible enough to integrate them efficiently.

Collaboration to teach the critical thinking skills needed to become a successful Internet searcher: The planning of a WWW search engine workshop

What skills will librarians of the future require to ensure that our patrons' needs are met? One that comes immediately to mind is the ability to maximize shrinking budgets by collaborating with other agencies. A second skill that librarians of the future will require is the ability to take advantage of a networked environment. The following is a description of a collaboratively planned seminar designed to identify and teach World Wide Web (WWW) search skills. This workshop was created with an eye to “The Learning Library of the Future.”

Anchor point indexing in Web document retrieval

Traditional World Wide Web search engines, such as AltaVista.com, index and recommend individual Web pages to assist users in locating relevant documents. As the Web grows, however, the number of matching pages increases at a tremendous rate. Users are often overwhelmed by the large answer set recommended by the search engines. Also, if a matching document is a hypertext, the document structure is destroyed and the individual pages that compose the document are returned instead. The logical starting point of the hyperdocument is thus hidden among the large basket of matching pages. Users need to spend a lot of effort browsing through the pages to locate the starting point, a very time consuming process. This paper studies the anchor point indexing problem. The set of anchor points of a given user query is a small set of key pages from which the larger set of documents that are relevant to the query can be easily reached. The use of anchor points helps solve the problems of huge answer set and low precision suffered by most search engines by considering the hyperlink structures of the relevant documents, and by providing a summary view of the result set.

Forensic web watch

Now that one has logged onto the world wide web (WWW) and utilized one or more of the home pages listed previously (or used another equally good home page) to seek out basic information available to forensic practitioners, the question now arises of how to go about making the most of the information available. One feature consistent to most home pages is links to the home pages of Associations and Societies, one or more of which most practitioners will be members of. With access to the WWW not only have you access to your own association/society, but you can also keep up to date with all the others to which you have not paid subscriptions. Although an internet search using a WWW search engine or the ‘top 6’ home pages may assist in identifying a large number of association and society sites, one of the most useful places to start is the home page of the Indian Academy of Forensic Medicine (IAFM). This, to date, lists a total of 139 such sites. To access all the home pages listed may take in excess of 6 h so the following review looks at the range of sites available and recommends some places the author considers many people may wish to know and visit. Again, this is inevitably a personal choice and it is recognized that those sites not listed may, in fact, be the preferred choice for other users of the forensic WWW.

Automatically Determining Semantics for World Wide Web Multimedia Information Retrieval

Search engines are useful because they allow the user to find information of interest from the World Wide Web (WWW). However, most of the popular search engines today are textual; they do not allow the user to find images from the web. For effective retrieval, determining the semantics of the images is essential. In this paper, we describe the problems in determining the semantics of images on the WWW and the approach of AMORE, a WWW search engine that we have developed. AMORE's techniques can be extended to other media like audio and video. We explain how we assign keywords to the images based on HTML pages and the method to determine similar images based on the assigned text. We also discuss some statistics showing the effectiveness of our technique. Finally, we present the visual interface of AMORE with the help of several retrieval scenarios.

Searching the world wide Web

The coverage and recency of the major World Wide Web search engines was analyzed, yielding some surprising results. The coverage of any one engine is significantly limited: No single engine indexes more than about one-third of the "indexable Web," the coverage of the six engines investigated varies by an order of magnitude, and combining the results of the six engines yields about 3.5 times as many documents on average as compared with the results from only one engine. Analysis of the overlap between pairs of engines gives an estimated lower bound on the size of the indexable Web of 320 million pages.

Automatic classification of Web resources using Java and Dewey Decimal Classification

The Wolverhampton Web Library 1 1 http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/wwlib/ (WWLib) is a World Wide Web search engine that provides access to UK based information. The experimental version, developed in 1995, was a success but highlighted the need for a much higher degree of automation. An interesting feature of the experimental WWLib was that it organised information according to Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) [1]. This paper discusses the advantages of classification and describes the automatic classifier that is being developed in Java as part of the new, fully automated WWLib.

Inquirus, the NECI meta search engine

World Wide Web (WWW) search engines (e.g. AltaVista, Infoseek, HotBot, etc.) have a number of deficiencies including: periods of downtime, low coverage of the WWW, inconsistent and inefficient user interfaces, out of date databases, poor relevancy ranking and precision, and difficulties with spamming techniques. Meta search engines have been introduced which address some of these and other difficulties in searching the WWW. However, current meta search engines retain some of these difficulties and may also introduce their own problems (e.g. reduced relevance because one or more of the search engines returns results with poor relevance). We present Inquirus, the NECI meta search engine, which addresses many of the deficiencies in current techniques. Rather than working with the list of documents and summaries returned by search engines, as current meta search engines typically do, the Inquirus meta search engine works by downloading and analyzing the individual documents. The Inquirus meta search engine makes improvements over existing search engines in a number of areas, e.g.: more useful document summaries incorporating query term context, identification of both pages which no longer exist and pages which no longer contain the query terms, advanced detection of duplicate pages, improved document ranking using proximity information, dramatically improved precision for certain queries by using specific expressive forms, and quick jump links and highlighting when viewing the full documents.

Web search engines

This review looks briefly at the history of World Wide Web search engine development, considers the current state of affairs, and reflects on the future. Networked discovery tools have evolved along with Internet resource availability. World Wide Web search engines display some complexity in their variety, content, resource acquisition strategies, and in the array of tools they deploy to assist users. A small but growing body of evaluation literature, much of it not systematic in nature, indicates that performance effectiveness is difficult to assess in this setting. Significant improvements in general-content search engine retrieval and ranking performance may not be possible, and are probably not worth the effort, although search engine providers have introduced some rudimentary attempts at personalization, summarization, and query expansion. The shift to distributed search across multitype database systems could extend general networked discovery and retrieval to include smaller resource collections with rich metadata and navigation tools. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Health on the Net automated database of health and medical information

With the number of World Wide Web sites growing every day, the problem is not just to find information, but to locate the right piece of information. Current World Wide Web search engines have not resolved this problem as they most often return a long list of documents. The search result is then unusable because of the large number of answers from different domains and topics. Only complex queries may, in a given situation, produce a limited number of potentially relevant documents. To make searches more efficient and usable by common users, we now need intelligent and specialised search engines on the Net [1, 2]. Health On the Net Foundation and the Molecular Imaging and Bioinformatics Laboratory at Geneva University Hospital have developed Multi-Agent Retrieval Vagabond on Information Networks (MARVIN), a robot that searches sites and documents specifically related to a given specialised field. One such robot has already been implemented and used for the medical and the 2D electrophoresis domains. Health On the Net Foundation has implemented the corresponding search engines, MedHunt (http://www.hon.ch/cgi-bin/find) for the medical field and 2DHunt (http://www.hon.ch/cgi-bin/2DHunt/find) for the 2D electrophoresis field.

The design of World Wide Web search engines: a critical review

A ‘World Wide Web search engine’ is defined as a retrieval service, consisting of a database (or databases) describing mainly resources available on the World Wide Web (WWW), search software and a user interface also available via WWW. After intro ducing early Internet search engines, which are pertinent as precursors for the current range of WWW search engines, the problems of searching the WWW (link persistence, lack of integrated search software) and the resulting search engine types (keyword or directory) are analysed. Search engines of all types are then compared across their generic features (database content, retrieval software, and search interface), rather than on a search engine by search engine basis. Finally, wider information access issues aris ing from the nature of the Internet and web search engines are considered, and a general strategy for using web search engines is proposed.

Weblint: Quality assurance for the World Wide Web

More and more people are creating World Wide Web (WWW) pages. This explosive growth of the WWW is made easier through a widening variety of web browsers, each implementing its own interpretation of HTML. WWW search engines which extract information from pages based on their structure have multiplied just as rapidly. All these things mean it is increasingly important that web pages are checked for legal syntax and for additional problems, such as portability across browsers. This paper develops an initial taxonomy of HTML problems and describes weblint, a tool which can be used to identify a number of these problems.

WISE: a World Wide Web resource database system

The paper describes the World Wide Web Index and Search Engine (WISE) for Internet resource discovery. The system is designed around a resource database containing meta information about WWW resources and is automatically built using an indexer robot, a special WWW client agent. The resource database allows users to search for resources based on keywords, and to learn about potentially relevant resources without having to directly access them. Such capabilities can significantly reduce the amount of time that a user needs to spend in order to find the information of his/her interest. We discuss WISE's main components: the resource database, the indexer robot, the search engine, and the user interface, and through the technical discussions, we highlight the research issues involved in the design, the implementation and the evaluation of such a system.