TOPIC 4: Search Engines

Millions of people around the world use search engines (i.e Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc) almost every day. In ancient times, people often went for books and knowledgeable persons when they faced difficulties beyond their abilities. However, nowadays, we can simply type the keywords in the search box and then in less than a second we are loaded with bunch of useful answers on screen. Amazing right? 👏🏼

Do you ever wonder how does the search engine really works? 🤔

Database, Web Crawler, User Interface and Information Retrieval System are the major components of a search engine that makes it works.

Database         - all the info on the web is stored here which consists of huge resources.

Web Crawler   - a software component that crawl all over the web to gather information.

User Interface - a component that helps user to search through the database.

Information Retrieval System - a system used to tailor the user's query to the webpages found in                                                             database.

In my point of view, I think search engines save most of our time online not only by performing searches at high speed but also by eliminating the need to find information manually. These search engines automatically compares your criteria to billions of webpages and give us the results in a less than a second. Besides, we can use specialized search engines (i.e Google Scholar, Pipl.com, Art Cyclopedia) when we need a specialized kind of result. If you're looking for something very specific and the big search engines are not giving the answer, then specialized search engine that might be able to do the job.

Though search engine can benefit us a lot, we need to use it carefully to gain what we want but in the same time avoiding harmful information.