Resources for Information Skills
Section contents page Introduction Choosing the right tool for the job Search engines When to use information gateways and specialist databases Google Access to the invisible web Google development How to get the best out of Google Why not always Google? Other search engines Meta-search engines Why use a directory? Overview Summary
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Google

Google is the most popular web search engine on the World Wide Web with hundreds of millions search query every single day. Certainly, exact number web pages are not known. However, Google claimed to have found over one trillion unique Uniform Resources Locators (URL) and a number of web pages seem be growing several billion pages per day (Alpert and Hajaj, (2008). Similarly, they also claim to have indexed well over 8 billion pages, but despite this, they still lack 100% coverage.

Why Google enjoys "better" than other search engines at searching web pages and how effective is a Google search?

Factors such as ease of use, efficiency of search, and relevancy of results are some of the basic rationales why people use Google. Moreover, you need to understand a bit about how search engine functions.They run on the automated programs called spiders or robots, which crawl from web page to page through links and URLs. They indexed all the words on the web pages as key words forming a huge database. Then your key words entered in search box are match against this database. Clearly, there is huge duplication and spamming. For this reason the search engine may limit the number of web pages within one site and how much of website they search. For instance, search engines may index all the words of first ten pages from the website.

Alpert, J. and Hajaj, N., (2008).We knew the web big[online].Google Official blog. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html#!/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html [accessed 16 May 2012].