Kenneth C. Laudon,Jane P. Laudon Management Information System 12th Edition pdf

Search Engines

Obviously, with so many Web pages, finding specific Web

pages that can help you or your business, nearly instantly, is an important

problem. The question is, how can you find the one or two pages you really

want and need out of billions of indexed Web pages? 

Search engines

attempt to

solve the problem of finding useful information on the Web nearly instantly,

and, arguably, they are the “killer app” of the Internet era. Today’s search

engines can sift through HTML files, files of Microsoft Office applications, PDF

files, as well as audio, video, and image files. There are hundreds of different

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Part Two

Information Technology Infrastructure

search engines in the world, but the vast majority of search results are supplied

by three top providers: Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Web search engines started out in the early 1990s as relatively simple

software programs that roamed the nascent Web, visiting pages and gathering

information about the content of each page. The first search engines were sim-

ple keyword indexes of all the pages they visited, leaving the user with lists of

pages that may not have been truly relevant to their search. 

In 1994, Stanford University computer science students David Filo and Jerry

Yang created a hand-selected list of their favorite Web pages and called it “Yet

Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” or Yahoo!. Yahoo! was not initially a

search engine but rather an edited selection of Web sites organized by cate-

gories the editors found useful, but it has since developed its own search engine

capabilities. 

In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two other Stanford computer science

students, released their first version of Google. This search engine was differ-

ent: Not only did it index each Web page’s words but it also ranked search

results based on the relevance of each page. Page patented the idea of a page

ranking system (PageRank System), which essentially measures the popularity

of a Web page by calculating the number of sites that link to that page as well as

the number of pages which it links to. Brin contributed a unique Web crawler

program that indexed not only keywords on a page but also combinations of

words (such as authors and the titles of their articles). These two ideas became

the foundation for the Google search engine. Figure 7-13 illustrates how Google

works.

Search engine Web sites are so popular that many people use them as their

home page, the page where they start surfing the Web(see Chapter 10). As use-

ful as they are, no one expected search engines to be big money makers. Today,

however, search engines are the foundation for the fastest growing form of mar-

keting and advertising, search engine marketing. 

Search engines have become major shopping tools by offering what is now

called