Challenges in web search engines
This article discussed some of the more common problems that cause search engines to return poor results. The discussion on quality is interesting because when most of us use a search engine I believe we think of our chosen engine (let's be honest, almost all of us use Google), we don't see it as a qualitative question.
While we expect a search engine to consider whether or not a webpage has the information we are searching for I don't think we expect the search engine to decide if the information provided is reliable or not.
Web Search Engines: Part 1 and Part 2
This two part article takes us backstage to see what's happening when we use popular search engines to find webpages.
Part 1 focuses on the complexities of the growing web and how web crawlers fight those complexities to return relevant results. Of course this is a game that cannot be won. As the internet grows and there are more webpages to crawl and more spam to avoid web crawlers will have to continue to adapt.
Part 2 focuses on how the results web crawlers return are indexed. This part of the article focuses on page rank and other factors that help determine what web pages appear on our first page of results after searching.
