Richard E. Peterson
Professor, Financial Economics & Institutions
College of Business Administration
University of Hawaii
Honolulu, HI 96822
(808) 956-7563
FAX: (808) 956-9887
E-mail : peterso@ fei.cba.hawaii.edu
April 1996
Finding information is another way by which information itself gets published. This is the forte of the Internet search engine. A search engine classification scheme is proposed, consisting of the
The top three primary search engines are identified: Alta Vista, Lycos, and Open Text. The specialized search engines can be expected to play an important role as the Internet continues its rapid growth.
The World Wide Web
A major part and fastest growing portion of the Internet is the World
Wide Web (WWW), also known as Cyberspace. The WWW consists of sites which
contain documents written in the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Within
these documents there are underlined or colorfully highlighted phrases
which are "hot links". Point your computer mouse at them, click, and you
will be taken to that new location, a location which could be located
continents away. A common name for Internet sites is "home pages" which
have an Internet address known as a "Universal Resource Locator" (URL). My
home page, for example, has a URL of http://www2.hawaii.edu/~rpeterso
My Home Page
Anyone in the world who is connected to the Internet can access my home
page. Although it is still under construction, it does have six major
items.
Finding information
The Internet Search engine is the engine of a vehicle or taxicab
delivering information along the Information Superhighway. The request
for information is made via a keyword query to the search engine.
I recently needed to find a copy of the American Psychological Association (APA) guidelines for writing scholarly papers. I submitted the phrase "APR guidelines" to the Alta Vista search engine. After 20 or 30 seconds, the guidelines in summarized form appeared as a clickable link and, a minute or two later, I had the printed copy.
Communication
Communication is , in part, access to information and it is also
publication of information. The Information Highway is really a
Communication Highway. Both the "access to" and the "publication of" have
been revolutionized. Access is virtually instantaneous and is obtainable
from search engines. Publication, in a nominal sense, occurs when your
Web page is connected to the Internet, and occurs in a real sense when the
search engines discover your site or you notify the search engines of your
existence.
Although the computer revolutionized computation, the Internet as cyberspace will revolutionize communication. As indicated by the Economist (pp 13-14, March 23, 1996), "You do not have to be a nerd or a mystic to see that historians will look back upon the emergence of 'cyberspace' as a turning point no less decisive than the advent of the computer itself." Whereas the computer does computation, the Internet does communication.
The Variety of Search Engines
There are literally hundreds of search engines, so it is hard to know
where to start. Although the top three mentioned earlier are like a
council of towering redwoods at the entrance of a forest, the other trees
can each, in their own way, provide value-added services. As an initial
simplification, there are only four types of search engine, as follows.
Primary Search Engines
Their robots have accessed a significant portion of the Internet and the
resulting database is keyword searchable. Thus defined, there are six
primary search engines:
Niche Search Engines
These search engines have gatherers which can be either human or
robotic. They collect information to form databases of a small fraction
(under ten percent) or a specialized segment of the Internet. Examples of
the small fraction search engine are
The specialized segment database, known also as a subject directory, comes in two varieties: browsable and searchable. A subject directory is a search engine if it is searchable. A browsable subject directory, such as the Bookmark page on my Web page,is not a search engine. The most famous of all subject directories, Yahoo, is searchable as well as browsable.
When you "do a Yahoo," you use Yahoo to look up a keyword phrase. Yahoo first searches its 21-category subject directory and suggests sites for you to visit; it then uses the primary search engine, Open Text, to search the portion of the Internet covered by its database.
There are over a hundred specialized segment search engines. Here are a few:
Mega Index Search Engines
These do not have robots that scurry to and fro picking up sites.
They do, however, provide access to primary search engines, niche search
engines, and even other mega index search engines. They attempt to
provide an all in one location for accessing information on the Internet.
There are over a hundred; here is a sampling.
Bobaworld accesses each of the six primary search engines and NetPad accesses five of them. NetPad accesses a number of additional sites:
Simultaneous Mega Index Search Engines
These access most of the primary search engines all at once.
There are just two:
Conclusion
The information seeker will have a daunting task if there are
hundreds of search engines and if all search engines are equal. But they
are not all equal.
It is reassuring to know that there are only six search engines that cover a significant part of the Internet. In fact, the Top Three (Alta Vista, Lycos, and Open Text) will between them bring most searches to a successful result.
There are, however, important segments of the Internet that are currently best covered by specialized search engines. If you are lucky, the primary search engine will point you to these specialized databases. In a sense, this begs the question since you are likely to get 200 or so returns for your query and these will take hours to explore. A general knowledge of what's available with the niche search engines, then, should be included in the information seeker's repertoire.