What is a Search Engine? Explain three categories of search engines.

Search Engines are programs that search documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. A search engine is really a general class of programs, however, the term is often used to specifically describe systems like Google, Bing and Yahoo! Search that enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web.

Types of Search Engine.

Crawler-based search engines:

such as Google, All The Web and Alta Vista, create their listings automatically by using a piece of software to “crawl” or “spider” the web and then index what it finds to build the search base. Web page changes can be dynamically caught by crawler-based search engines and will affect how these web pages get listed in the search results.

Crawler-based search engines are good when you have a specific search topic in mind and can be very efficient in finding relevant information in this situation. However, when the search topic is general, crawler-base search engines may return hundreds of thousands of irrelevant responses to simple search requests, including lengthy documents in which your keyword appears only once.

Human-powered directories:

such as the Yahoo directory, Open Directory and Look Smart, depend on human editors to create their listings. Typically, webmasters submit a short description to the directory for their websites, or editors write one for the sites they review, and these manually edited descriptions will form the search base.

Therefore, changes made to individual web pages will have no effect on how these pages get listed in the search results. Human-powered directories are good when you are interested in a general topic of search. In this situation, a directory can guide and.help you narrow your search and get refined results. Therefore, search results found in a human-powered directory are usually more relevant to the search topic and more accurate. However, this is not an efficient way to find information when a specific search topic is in mind.

Meta-search engines:

such as Dogpile, Mamma, and Meta crawler, transmit user-supplied keywords simultaneously to several individual search engines to actually carry out the search. Search results returned from all the search engines can’ be -integrated., duplicates can be eliminated and additional features such as clustering by subjects within the search results can be implemented by meta-search engines.

Meta-search engines are good for saving time by searching only in one place and sparing the need to use and learn several separate search engines. “But since meta-search engines do not allow for input of Many search variables, their best use is to find hits on obscure items or to see if something can be found using the Internet.”