Yahoo s concept of one big, categorized list of bookmarks needed to be backed up with searchable, computer-generated indexes of all the words on all the pages collected by spider programs crawling the Web, such as AltaVista, Go, Northern Light and the Inktomi index fueling HotBot, MSN and other search services. But as these computer-driven indexes grew in size to cover claims of up to 500 million pages, the results of simple word searches became unwieldy and frustrating for even savvy computer users. So the search scientists brought the people s choices back into the programs. Google, the favorite computer-made search engine, according to an informal survey of more than 40 professional news researchers, uses the Web community s expertise in its page ranking. Just as you trust the links on a really good site to get you to other good pages, Google crawls the Web scooping up hyperlinks and uses them to figure out how important a page is by what s pointing to it.
Subject specialization is another trend.
There are searchable directories that only categorize the Web content in a specific area, such as law , golf or chocolate . Web searching guide. There s much more multimedia. And delivery to wireless devices is a natural progression. Both let you click on a word in a Web page or other documents to find links to related information, such as definitions or news.