The term web search engine is defined as a software system that is developed to search the information from the internet especially from the World Wide Web. Search Engine Result Pages also known as SERPs are the search results that are presented in a line of results generally. The information of the search varies and maybe a collection of various web pages, images, video links to some websites and some other extensions files. The main part of the search engine is that it also maintains real-time information by running various algorithms on web crawler. It is a bot that browses the World Wide Web very systematically. It has various purposes in the internet. Web indexing or web spidering is also implemented by the help of the bots.
Search engines history-
Web search engines were started in the year 1990. The first well documented search engine that was used to search files and contents. More specifically, FTP files Archie was debuted on 10 September 1990. Also, the world wide web was entirely indexed by hand before September 1993. That time, the count of web servers grows at a faster rate as more and more web servers existed on the web. Consequently, the central list management was getting complex.
Archie was the first tool that is used for the purpose of searching content on the Internet. It was created by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and J. Peter Deutsch who were students at McGill University Montreal in the department of computer science. Further, Gopher was created in the year 1991 by a computer scientist Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota. He also led the two common search programs which were called as Veronica and Jughead. They do search like Archie used to applied. They searched the file names and titles which are stored in Gopher index systems. Specifically, veronica provided a keyword search for most Gopher menu titles. Jughead was also a tool which was used to obtain the menu information from some specific Gopher servers. Matthew Gray at MIT developed the first web robot, later in the year 1993. Wanderer was a perl language-based robot to create index. The index created by wanderer was known as wandex. The main purpose of wanderer was to actually measure the size of the World Wide Web. The second search engine of the world wide web was known as Aliweb that was developed in the November 1993. Aliweb was not dependent on any robot. It was depended only to get notified by the various website administrators.
Search Engine Technology-
Normally, a search engine consists of four main components namely ‘Search Interface’, ‘Crawler’, ‘Indexer’, and ‘Database’.
Search Engine Interface
Search engine provides us an interface that groups the search items and enables you to select and specify criteria of your interests and have the engine which finds the matching items as result.
Web Crawler
A web crawler, sometimes called a spider, is a bot (as explained earlier) that browses the World Wide Web.
Indexer
An indexer indexes the web. Web indexing are various methods of indexing the contents of a website or of the internet as a whole.
Database
A database is used to manage the data online.
Working of a Search Engine-
All the above-mentioned units combined work as your search engine. Following two features are important to know about search engines:
Crawling
When a web crawler visits a web page, it starts collecting all the links on the page. Further, it adds these links in a list for visiting the further pages to visit. This process is repeated for further traversing. This process here means that any website that is linked from an indexed website will be crawled. Usually, some sites get crawled more frequently and some to greater depths.
Indexing
The data from a crawl is processed and placed in the database. This is known as indexing.
Retrieval and Ranking
The search engine processes your search query and returns the most relevant pages. Most search engines differentiate themselves by their retrieval methods. Ranking algorithms check your search against billions of pages to check their relevance.
Effective Use of Search Engines-
Nowadays where everything and all the knowledge is available on the Internet, online research has become an essential skill. Previously the knowledge was only available at libraries and any more would need a visit to the experts but the Internet has changed that. Experts can be contacted through E-mails or video conferences and search engines have become extremely important tools, hence there is a need to learn the effective use of the search engines is important.
Search skills can be developed through practice or by reading the help pages provided by the search engines themselves. Over time one realizes what search engines are good to search what kind of information.
The Basics of Searching:
Generally high number of keywords used in your search will get you more accurate results. Try to use additional keywords in your search to eliminate any unwanted results. For example, if you want to search something about Virat Kohli the Cricketer, simply searching “Virat Kohli” might get you some results of websites that mention other Virat Kohli’s that might not be the person that you’re looking for while searching for “Virat Kohli Indian Cricket Team” will get you more accurate results and will eliminate any unwanted data. Although this method may remove any unwanted data but it might miss out the results that mention Virat Kohli the cricketer but not the Indian Cricket team, therefore fine tuning your search as much as possible will give you better results.
Concluding remarks on effective searching
There is no perfect search engine or search algorithm that will give you exactly what you need, however certain search engines do give you better results than others. You should take some time getting used to the different search engines and see what they have to offer. Reading the help section works very well especially when we did not get any relevant filtered content from the search engines. Further, we may combine the help contents with the advance search options that are provided by each search engines for better filtering of the results.
Surfing the web
Web surfing means to search for random various topics and search and get into information about. That is surfing randomly on various topics.
Surfing process is considered like going over through different mediums of web contents and leave the details to be filtered by the user after reading the contents and researching further FOR better and specific results. Generally, surfing is a wider term than simply browsing because in case of dubiousness on filtered material, browsing may get shaped into surfing to search for the reliable web content.
The internet media is a big and ill-managed informational juncture for those who are not tech savvy. There is a lot of material that surfer can search to make their quest for knowledge better and easier too. When looking for a specific item in this cyber active library it is easier to have a preplanning before search, and then gradually fetch the particular subject out of the result given by the internet. Most likely, using searching tools will be your first means of finding what it is that you need. When using a search tool for the first time it is suggested to have a general understanding of the tool first. You must know the proper functioning on how it works, and the type of language supported when processing with such tools. For e.g. a general search tool usually has their own and unique criteria, thus making the search for information that much more difficult matters too. Responses to a particular statement query can vary accordingly from search tool to search tool as their search algorithms are different too. Also, the same query sent by the same inspection tool may come up with various responses depending upon time, place etc, because web pages are dynamically added, removed and updated. You will experience that if you consistently use the internet, then the things which you surf most of the time that things will become less difficult for you to search in future as your experience broadens in the hand of search tools. To be more technical, this idea is called machine learning.
Today life style must include surfing the internet for petty things. Such as finding out nearby landmarks, ATMs, Hospitals, booking a taxi etc. and this has become our daily routine practice. Using internet we do several things viz. online shopping for various things, doing social networking, disseminating various information on the internet etc. The aim of the internet is to provide solutions for our problems related to any sector or area. To better segregate the problems various sections and sub-section-wise listing is usually made in each sector. Such an instance, there exists various categories of all the items such as clothes have sub categories as men-wear, women-wear, kids-wear etc. This is being choosen during the browsing the specific websites. I don’t have to go outsides to buy them, which saves me a lot of time.it is especially convenient when the weather is not good. Second, we can make many kinds of friends on the internet. We can know foreign friends who can tell us about their experiences, cultures work, and so on through the internet. On the other hand, we don’t have to go long distance to meet them; we can just sit in front of the computer and talk to them in English. Therefore, making friends on the internet can not only open our mind to the world but also improve our language skills. Third, we can get lots of information from the internet. If we didn’t have the internet, we would have to spend much time searching information. Nowadays, we only need to key words into Google and we will find a lot of relevant information. It is very convenient and can save us much time.in addition we can get the news of news of current events instantly on the internet. We can also choose what we want to know on the web. We can not only save time in searching news but also save the money for buying newspapers.
Finally, the internet plays a vital role in making human life convenient and variably problem solvable by providing lots of options.
Web surfing vs. web browsing-
Web surfing and web browsing are two different terms of the internetworking. The main difference is that going through or searching for a specific information on a specific website is web surfing while whereas going through information aimlessly on different subjects on the different websites is what is termed as web browsing. Usually, the internet users just keep sitting in front of the computer and go through the different websites on the internet for many hours without any aim. And often, this habit of simply clicking through the pages of the various site is termed as web browsing.
The terms surfing and browsing are generally referred to the task of searching on the internet. Most of the times, both the browsing and the surfing looks as much as the same. But, the actual difference between the two terms depends on the assigned task based on what a user might browse the internet just might just surf it. So, as said before, if an internet user is using a particular browser, going through websites in search for a particular thing, it is termed as web browsing or simply browsing, whereas if the user is randomly searching or going through different websites for information gathering then this process is termed as surfing.
On the other hand, in general there is no difference between the term’s web browsing and web surfing as both of these two processes are quite similar. Due to various varieties of the available web browsers, the type of information and their process to extract the information in these web browsers is also quite different technically.
Web searches may also be used for any kind of query such as doing the research on some topics, searching the latest news, searching the old news, looking for the current openings in any organization, paying the utility bill payment services etc.
So, based on above facts, it doesn’t take any notable difference in the acting of browsing and surfing. Both the terms are commonly used by people to define the action of redirecting or switching or moving among websites. Even downloading or streaming of the audio, video or both contents from the internet is also possible by means of web browsing and web surfing. As a result, any intended interned user may watch, read, summarize, listen to music, view and download videos by simply wandering among websites by means of web surfing or web browsing.
Comparison between web surfing and web browsing-
Surfing process is time consuming and may create confusions. Sometimes it may lead to unwanted and unnecessary bifurcation. While browsing a specific and known website may lead in getting the desired result without generating any unwanted and unnecessary noise in the results.
The Pros and Cons of surfing-
In the today trend of internet, no person, no enterprise, any tradition or anything else is far from internet. Now-a-days, children would rather use internet for entertainment, infotainment and for other purposes too. For this purpose, he or she uses the devices such as smart phones, laptops, desktops, ipads etc. These devices provide efficient and wireless facility for internetworking. Moreover, online live and interactive game are available in abundance too.
The internet also plays a vital role in our daily lives because of the lots of advantages it brings. Internet has made our work a lot easier than earlier. Employees can find information about new recruitments without physically going to other organizations, customers get update on latest products or new arrivals on their product of interest such as clothing, music, loots on the mall etc. Students may get full knowledge on any topic without touching the pen-paper for his exercise. The list is quite long that gives advantages of using internet. In a nut shell, the things are converting from paper-based to less-paper-based. And the target of the internet community will soon touch the height by governing all the processes paper-less i.e. no paper requirement, as everything will be stored on the internet.
Now-a-days, all the information is transparent and the users are able to find out updated information about what is happening in the world. Because internet user spread all over the world are using the internet and making pressure groups is much easier for them. Using intern one can easily be updated on news of every area. Moreover, the user may subscribe himself or herself to get specific news updates on his phone, or emails by subscribing themselves with the newsgroups. Some examples include political news, competitive exams news, Jobs opening for freshers or experienced employees, weather forecasting updates, updates on product promotion offers by the manufacturers or retailers such as online shopping portals etc.