Search Engines: The players and the field
The mechanics of a typical search.
The search engine wars.
Statistics from search engine logs. The architecture of a search engine.
The query engine.
Mechanics of a typical search
Results & ads returned ranked
Category of first result
Result for phrase query
Search on the Web
Corpus: The publicly accessible Web: static + dynamic Goal: Retrieve high quality results relevant to the users need
(not docs!) Informational want to learn about something Low hemoglobin Navigational want to go to that page United Airlines Transactional want to do something (web-mediated)
Access a service Downloads
Need
Shop
Tampere weather Mars surface images Nikon CoolPix Car rental Finland Abortion morality
Gray areas
Find a good hub Exploratory search see whats there
Search Engines as Info Gatekeepers
Search engines are becoming the primary entry point for discovering web pages. Ranking of web pages influences which pages users will view. Exclusion of a site from search engines will cut off the site from its intended audience. The privacy policy of a search engine is important.
Introna & Nissenbaum: Defining the Web: The Politics of Search Engines Hindman et al: Googlearchy: How a few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web
Search Engine Wars
The battle for domination of the web search space is heating up! The competition is good news for users! Crucial: advertising is combined with search results! What if one of the search engines will manage to dominate the space?
Yahoo!
Synonymous with the dot-com boom, probably the best known brand on the web. Started off as a web directory service in 1994, acquired leading search engine technology in 2003.
Has very strong advertising and e-commerce partners
Lycos!
One of the pioneers of the field
Introduced innovations that inspired the creation of Google
Verb google has become synonymous with searching for information on the web. Has raised the bar on search quality Has been the most popular search engine in the last few years.
Had a very successful IPO in August 2004.
Is innovative and dynamic. Has restored glamour in CS lost in dot-com-bust
Google
Synonymous with PC software.
Live Search (was:
MSN Search)
Remember its victory in the browser wars with Netscape.
Developed its own search engine technology only recently, officially launched in Feb. 2005. May link web search into its next version of Windows.
Ask Jeeves
Specialises in natural language question answering. Search driven by Teoma.
Cuil
The latest kid on the block Claims to have indexed 120B pages! So far, it does not rank!
Experiment with query syntax
Default is AND, e.g. computer chess normally interpreted as computer AND chess, i.e. both keywords must be present in all hits. +chess in a query means the user insists that chess be present in all hits. computer OR chess means either keywords must be present in all hits. computer chess means that the phrase computer chess must be present in all hits.
Statistics from search engine logs
Statistic (Year) average terms per query average queries per session average result pages viewed usage of advanced search features AltaVista (1998) 2.35 2.02 1.39 20.4% AlltheWeb Excite (2002) (2001) 2.30 2.60 2.80 1.55 1.0% 2.30 1.70 10.0%
The most popular search keywords
AltaVista (1998) AlltheWeb (2002) Excite (2001)
sex applet porno mp3 free sex download software free sex pictures new
chat
uk
nude
Web search Users
Ill-defined queries
Specific behavior
Short length Imprecise terms Sub-optimal syntax
(80% queries without operator)
Low effort in defining queries
85% look over one result screen only mostly above the fold 78% of queries are not modified
1 query/session
Wide variance in
Needs Expectations Knowledge Bandwidth
Follow links the scent of information ...
Query Distribution
Power law: few popular broad queries, many rare specific queries
How far do people look for results?
(Source: iprospect.com WhitePaper_2006_SearchEngineUserBehavior.pdf)
Architecture of a Search Engine
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User
Web
Miele, Inc -- Anything else is a compromise
Results 1 - 10 of about 7,310,000 for miele. (0.12 seconds)
At the heart of your home, Appliances by Miele. ... USA. to miele.com. Residential Appliances. Vacuum Cleaners. Dishwashers. Cooking Appliances. Steam Oven. Coffee System ... www.miele.com/ - 20k - Cached - Similar pages
Web spider
Miele
Welcome to Miele, the home of the very best appliances and kitchens in the world. www.miele.co.uk/ - 3k - Cached - Similar pages
Miele - Deutscher Hersteller von Einbaugerten, Hausgerten ... - [ Translate this page ] Das Portal zum Thema Essen & Geniessen online unter www.zu-tisch.de. Miele weltweit ...ein Leben lang. ... Whlen Sie die Miele Vertretung Ihres Landes. www.miele.de/ - 10k - Cached - Similar pages Herzlich willkommen bei Miele sterreich - [ Translate this page ]
Herzlich willkommen bei Miele sterreich Wenn Sie nicht automatisch weitergeleitet werden, klicken Sie bitte hier! HAUSHALTSGERTE ... www.miele.at/ - 3k - Cached - Similar pages
Search
Indexer
The Web Indexes Ad indexes
Rate of web content change
720K pages from 270 popular sites sampled daily from Feb 17 Jun 14, 1999 [Cho00]
Mathematically, what does this seem to be?
What does this suggest for crawling policy?
Diversity
Languages/Encodings
Hundreds of languages, W3C encodings: 55 (Jul01) [W3C01] Home pages (1997): English 82%, Next 15: 13% [Babe97] Google (mid 2001): English: 53%, JGCFSKRIP: 30%
Document & query topic
Popular Query Topics (from 1 million Google queries, Apr 2000)
Arts Computers Regional Society Adult Recreation Business 14.6% 13.8% 10.3% 8.7% 8% 7.3% 7.2% Arts: Music Regional: North America Adult: Image Galleries Computers: Software Computers: Internet Business: Industries Regional: Europe 6.1% 5.3% 4.4% 3.4% 3.2% 2.3% 1.8%
Search Index - Inverted File
Frequency
Also store position of word in web page (offset) and information on HTML structure.
The query engine
The interface between the search index, the user and the web. Algorithmic details of commercial search engines are kept as trade secrets. First step is retrieval of potential results from the index. Second step is the ranking of the results based on their relevance to the query.
Portal User Interface
Crawling the Web
Mode of crawl: BFS Frequency of crawl: important robots.txt gives explicit directions on what not to crawl Parallel machines crawl all the time
