We will review the principles of searching so you can increase your effectiveness in finding the information you are interested in. We'll use the AltaVista search engine to demonstrate these principles. The Internet is a giant library that is continually changing. There is no central card catalog. Search engines allow us to find specific information.
Users notify the search engine of new pages.
They maintain an index of the contents of every page they find. They periodically check out old connections to make sure they still exist. A recent survey showed that the best search engines have indexed less than half of the over 3 billion web pages on the web. All search engines have their own prioritizing or weighting schemes. The first word in a search is ranked more important than later word.