A search engine is a program which searches the database, gathers and reports the information which contains the specified or related terms (Mark, 2010) . Basically, there are three classes of search engines which are structure, content and size, but the content class is more relevant in this research. This class include general search engines, meta search engines and specialist/vertical search engines.
The general search engine covers the overall Web, using its own spider to collect web pages for its own index. Any change in the web pages can be identified by the crawler and will influence the listing of web pages in the search engines. When we want to find relevant information for a specific search query then in this condition crawler based search engine works efficiently and provides relevant results. But when we are interested in searching the general search query, then it provides many irrelevant search results. Because the spider in this engine searches the web constantly, it provides updated information. Examples of general search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo, Gigablast and Exalead.
Furthermore, there are also meta search engines. These ones fetch results from other search engines. The fetched results are combined and ranked again according to their relevancy. In addition, meta search engines were useful when each search engine had a significantly unique index and search engines were less savvy. Because the search has improved a lot, the need for these has reduced.
When to use a meta search engine
? When one wants the convenience of searching a variety of different content sources from one search page
? When one’s topic is obscure
? When one wants to retrieve a relatively small number of relevant results
MetaCrawler, MSN, Search .com, Mamma, Dog Pile and Clusty are some of the examples of meta search engines.
Moreover, the other type of search engines is specialist/vertical. It searches a specific subject, topic, type of content, piece of data, geographical location and so on. It may help to think of vertical search for a particular niche. Some of this content cannot be found, or is difficult to find, on general search engines. To find a vertical/specialist search engine, one can use a general search engine and try to find a search site dedicated to a particular type of content, for example medical search, job search and so on.
When to use a specialist/vertical search engine
? When one’s topic is focused on a specific topic, industry, content type, geographical location, language, etc.
? When one is having difficulty locating what they want on general, meta or concept categorizing search engines.
The examples of specialist/vertical search engines are Google scholar (a specialist search for full text scholarly articles) and worldwide science (a specialist search engine for sciences).
On the other hand, search engines have got their merits and demerits in academic research. Considering merits, exhaustive information can be retrieved by a search engine. Secondly, through using a search engine, people can expand their knowledge easily by simply typing keywords in search box and in less than a second thousands of useful answers will show on your screen. More so, search engines are best suited for complex keyword/concept searches. Through using search engines, sources can be limited to a period of time, fields, source type, etc. Some search engines, such as LewisNexis can be accessed freely. Google, Bing and Yahoo pay for their operations through advertising, searches are free to the user, without restrictions for the information you seek, the time spent on the site or the number of the searches you perform. Currency of information is also made possible by regular addition by web spiders.
The demerits of using search engines in academic research include that search engines show way too much useless on our screen. Sometimes you cannot even find anything useful from searching results. It wastes time to pick up useful information from seas of searching results. In addition, those who use search engines frequently may become lazy. Every time they meet difficulties they just go for search engine. They do not spend a little time to think of them. Use of search engines may lead to spamming. Another demerit is that search engines mostly rank pay sites when giving results of a search topic. Search engines also vary in terms of searching techniques.
REFERENCES
Mark Levene. (2010). An Introduction to Search Engines and Web Navigation. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Wen-Jen Yu, Sharne Koung Chou (2010). A Bibliometric Study of Search Engine Literature in the SSCI, Vol 5.
Ran Hock (2010). Major Search Engines – Features Guide online. Available at: http://extremesearcher.com/sechart.pdf
Sanjay Ghemawat,Howard Gobioff & Shun Tak Leung (2003). The Google File System, Proc. The Nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating System Principles, pp 29-43.
Curt Franklin. How Internet Search Engines Work online. Available at: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/search-engine.htm
John Papiewski (1991). LexisNexis Legal Solutions: Research & Practice Areas.
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