In today’s class, I was surprised to learn that major search engines scan only 20% of the content available on the web. Previously, my impression was that these engines were effective to the extent that search algorithms comprehensively scanned all of sites and computers linked to internet with the aim of presenting a reliable list of websites that could be used for research on a particular topic. Moreover, it would seem that these search sites would compete for the title of the website that is able to search the most web content. Web users would flock to the engine with the greatest search capacity. As the reputation of the top engine spread, other search sites would be forced to adapt and improve.
I also learned that the Google and Yahoo search engines return very different results. For example, a site ranked first by Google may be ranked 30th by Yahoo; moreover, a site that is returned by one search engine may not even be returned by the other. This suprised me because the laws of economics dictate that a market with a high level of competition and low barriers to entry produce homogenous products. Given the ease with which someone could create a web search engine, Google and Yahoo should offer similar (if not identical) products.
No comments:
Post a Comment