Search Engines

 

Module 3 Search Engines

Search Engines

Search Engine like Google index web pages and helps you to retrieve the relevant web pages based on your queries. Starting from today, in next few modules, we will focus on techniques and short-cuts to retrieve most relevant information from Google. 

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There are many search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN etc. However, we will focus on Google because it is most widely used search engine and has most of the market share of searching over the internet as illustrated from the Figure 3. 

To search on Google, type: https://www.google.com/ on the web browser, you will be shown the screen like shown in the Figure 4. 

Talk about protocol in the video is a bit confusing

1. 1. Query

Query is the set of words given to the search engine for searching for example, if you are interested to find “Virtual University” on the internet, you will provide this the text box available in the Figure 4 and you will be given the relevant results. 

1. 2. How Google Works

When you search in the Google by typing any query in the text box shown in the Figure 4, Google finds all those pages which contains all the terms given in the query. Try the following queries and see the results: What is search and the keyword is require for search

1. 1. Try Searching on Google 

1. “Airport”
2. “Where is the closest airport”
3. “Virtual University in Islamabad”

[Note: If you find any query with double quotations like “”, you should not give this query in double quotations on Google, I am attaching double quotations just to make sure that you can understand it is a query not a running text. Otherwise posting a query in double quotations has a particular meaning in Google which you will learn in next modules.]  

1. 4. Use of Microphone

There is another option of microphone as can be seen in the Figure 4 on the right side. If you click on you can search by speaking.

1. 5. Flip a Coin

If you want to flip a coin and you do not have the coin to flip, you can use Google to do that. To achieve this just type the following on Google: 

“Flip a Coin”

1. 6. Query Formulation

Always remember, when you search, Google will try to identify the pages on which the provided term is available. For example, if your head is in pain and you type: 

“Head Hurts”

It might not give you relevant results as when head is in pain, then its medical name is headache. So, your query should be: 

“Headache “

Similarly, if you are interested to search the name of the head of the virtual university and type the query as: 

“Head of the virtual university”

Google can give you wrong result for example the web page which contains the term “head” and “virtual university” that might be the head office of virtual university. The right query could be: 

“Rector of virtual university”

As the head of virtual university is called rector, therefore in this way it will give you more chance to search the right person effectively. 

3.7.  Capitalization

Google does not distinguish the capital letters or small letters. This is called case-insensitive in computer science. For example, search 

“COMPUTER SCIENCE” or “computer science”

Will not make a difference.