h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: A Guide to Using Search Engines - A1037792
Author: Oberon2001 (ACE) - Read The Edge in the Post - U204088

Hello one and all!
I rescued this from the Flea Market. Original entry -> A842311
Does anyone know what type of search engine BBCi use?
Share and enjoy.
Oberon2001

Very nice entry

I'd like to see some examples in the Boolean section and the section about quotes. For instance:

'If you're searching for information about the band Nirvana, you may find that you get a result which contains nothing but pages about Buddhism. You can refine your search by using either '+' or '-'.

If you enter 'Nirvana -Buddhism' into the search field the search engine will eliminate all pages which contain the word 'Buddhism'. On the other hand you can enter 'Nirvana +Cobain', the results will only contain pages which contain the words 'Nirvana' *and* 'Cobain' The lead singer of Nirvana was Curt Cobain'

And then:

'Quotation marks allow you to search for exact phrases. If, for instance, you want to know which film the phrase 'In space no-one can hear you scream' was the tagline for, you could simply type in the words, but what you'll get is every single page out there with any one of those words on it. If you put the entire phrase in quotes however - "In space no-one can hear you scream", the engine will only search for pages which contain that exact phrase. This is very handy when using the search engines on sites such as Amazon.com, eBay, and The Internet Movie Database to find the title of a book, album, or film.'

Considering them in and your good self credited
Oberon2001

This is shaping up to be a nice little entry. My tuppenceworth:

Google has become such a major internet search engine that there are even websites dedicated to it. Googleblog - http://google.blogspace.com/ - looks out for new and developments with the site, whilst Googlewatch - http://www.google-watch.org/ - looks out for what it considers to be Google's "abuse" of its dominant market position.

However sophisticated search engines claim to be, the truth is that are not always that clever. If you search for "widgets" they generally look for the page they have indexed with the most occurences of the word "widgets", with the word "widgets" in the largest text or in the title of the page. In human terms it is like walking into a library looking for information on the history of Istanbul, and then just picking the book that says "Istanbul" in the biggest letters on the side, whilst ignoring books about Turkey and Constantinople.

Some search engines get around this by trying to cluster together groups of similar results. Teoma does this, displaying categories of results on the right-hand side of the page [http://www.teoma.com] - and Vivissimo [http://vivisimo.com/] does this by querying several different search engines simultaneosly and attempting to classify the results on the left-hand side.

Other search engines use human input to help sort the results out. On BBCi, for example, a search for "china" within the BBC News site should bring back results that include a profile of the country [http://newssearch.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/search/results.pl?scope=newsukfs&tab=news&q=china], whilst doing the same search from BBCi Antiques [http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/search/results.pl?q=china&uri=%2Fantiques%2F] brings back a result about cramics first. Behind the scene a human-built taxonomy or directory tells the search engine that the two uses of the word 'china' are different.

You can do a web search from h2g2 by using the search box in the top right-hand corner of the page on any skin. Once you've typed your search in the box and pressed 'Go' you should see three tabs offering you a choice of searching BBCi, BBC News, or the Web. Clicking the Web tab will give you results for your search from the whole of the internet, not just from the BBC. BBCi uses a company called Inktomi to provide web search results, and they are specially filtered to make them more relevant to the UK and family-friendly. http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/about.shtml

One very interesting and different type of search engine is Kartoo [http://www.kartoo.com], which displays its results as a visual mind-map of connections between different sites. It is quite fun to use, if a little difficult to understand at first.

There are lots of resources about search engines on the internet - two of the best are Danny Sullivan's site SearchEngineWatch - http://www.searchenginewatch.com/ and SearchEngineBlog - http://www.searchenginewatch.com/

for the feedback.

- Great little Google gimmick -> http://www.googlefight.com

- I've added a little section on how big Google is at the moment due to it's search engine capabilities (I say "at the moment" 'cos you need to remember that Yahoo! was the market leader only 3-4 years ago)

- I've also added a little bit about the end about how search engines can sometimes mess things up.

- I've added some of the links you gave me and naturally have credited you as a researcher

Oberon2001

Dang - you beat me to it on Googlefight

Incidentally, I just did a 'Douglas Adams' v. 'Terry Pratchett' Googlefight. The result?

Douglas Adams 187,000
Terry Pratchett 114,000



And do you know the *real* power behind Google?
http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html

Coo. for the link to Kartoo. I hadn't heard of that one

I like this entry

Pimms

" Google will then assign an importance to each result based on how popular the page is on the web. This is judged mainly by the number of other pages that link to it. The results are then displayed with the most important first."

It might be worth adding that Google also pushes a result up even higher if important sites link to it. For instance linking from a BBC site will be considered more important than linking from a personal website.

Nice entry.

As if by it's in the entry
Oberon2001

Perhaps a reference might be made to meta search engines e.g. Copernic, which query multiple search engines at once and combine their results (removing duplicates!).

Wildman

I don't see why not. Consider it in
Oberon2001

Good point
http://www.metacrawler.com

you put a NOTE in the google section about how Google only searches for only 'all' the words. If you are going to mention this then you should also mention that options like these can be changed by going into an advanced search and restricting or expanding the area of the search.

also, i'm not sure if u have already mentioned this, since i only just scanned the entry, but if you haven't mentioned it then you maybe should mention how you don't just use web searches for webstes, but for things like pictures as well, where the search engine like Google searches for words in the picture filename.

spook

Sure. It's in.
Oberon2001

A tiny typo, footnote 1 'jsut' -> 'just'

www.googlewhack.com is good for a laugh, it is the art of typing two words into a search engine and returning exactly one hit. It is harder than you think! I did get one once but can't remember what it was...

Ah typos... Where would we be without them? Consider it fixed
... Must try that site out some time.
Oberon2001

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