A basic knowledge of search engines and metasearch engines is needed to be a successful internet searcher.

1. Search Engines and
Metasearch Engines

2. Basics
• What is the Internet?
• A massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It
connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network
in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as
long as they are both connected to the Internet.
• What is the World Wide Web?
• a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. It is
an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet. The
Web also utilizes browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox, to
access Web documents called Web pages that are linked to each
other via hyperlinks. Web documents also contain graphics, sounds,
text and video. The Internet, not the Web, is also used for e-mail,
which relies on SMTP, Usenet news groups, instant messaging and
FTP. So the Web is just a portion of the Internet, albeit a large
portion, but the two terms are not synonymous and should not be
confused.

3. The Internet Today
The link below shows graphically how large the internet is today
and how large it will grow to be in the future:
Size of the Internet

4. 10 Most Popular US Web Parent Companies
How many do you recognize?

5. So What Can We Get on the Internet?
News, multimedia
Nonprofit, charitable sites
Personal blogs, websites Company websites

6. And…

7. What’s Not Free on the Internet?

8. Not…
Subscription databases
Copyrighted materials: Books, Poetry,
Reference Works
And everything! People think “everything”
is on the internet
Research papers

9. Ahh, the Internet
The Good thing about the Internet – Anyone can post things to
the Web, can Blog, can create a Wiki, anything
The Bad thing about the Internet – Anyone can post things to
the Web, can Blog, can create a Wiki, anything.
Commercial on TV right now about believing everything on the
internet http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7VOE/state-farm-the-internet-
and-french-model

10. The Very Short History of
Search Engines
Only 20 years!

11. Search Engines
• First Internet search engine was Archie,
created in 1990 in McGill University
• WAIS, Wide Area Information Servers were next
• Followed by Gopher, and Veronica
and Jughead
• Growth of the web meant the creation of Web directories and
search engines but mostly titles were indexed.
• Web Crawler was the first full-text search engine in 1994.
• Lycos was created in 1993 and was the first commercial
success.

12. Now?
• Web crawlers (sometimes called spiders) follow links
• Content is indexed from words on the page or provided by
meta-tags
• A query is placed, and for a search engine like Google, a cache,
or copy of the page is presented. A search engine like AltaVista
stores every word match against the query.
• Caching always saves the page the search term is on. This can
be helpful if the page is updated and the search term is
eliminated from the page. Because the term is still there it
removes the possibility of “linkrot” when the term is no longer
available.

13. Good Searching & Problems
• Each search engine searches differently
• Always look to see if there is an advanced search option
• Some search engines use proximity searching, which
allows users to define the distance between keywords
Look at the link below for information about search
engines and their capabilities:
http://lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/SrchE
ngCriteria.pdf

14. Rank and Bomb
Search engines are supposed to rank results based on either
popularity or relevancy but many studies have shown other
things going on. There could be political, economic or social
biases. Companies can pay to advertise and get a higher ranking.
Politically there could be search results that are removed
because it violates local laws.
There is also something called Google Bombing which a web
page is created with a large number of links to cause a page to
have a high rank. An example is a 1999 Google bomb when a
user would search “more evil than Satan himself” and it resulted
in the Microsoft homepage!

15. Search Engines to Use in Class
In all but the last assignment, you may NOT use Google. The
idea is that you learn and compare other search engines.
Here are the general search engines to use:
• Bing
• Blekko
• DuckDuckGo
• Hakia
• Qunitura
• Yahoo

16. Metasearch Engines
• Metasearch engines are aggregators, sort of, of information
that may be in multiple or one search engine. In one search
you will be able to search all the major sources instead of
having to search each separately. One of the search engines
even searches SlideShare and Wikipedia in their main search.
• This link explains how Metasearch engines work and why you
might want to use them and add them to your Internet
searching tool belt.
• http://www.internettutorials.net/meta-search.asp

17. Metasearch Engines
Metasearch engines are where you will find some of the more
creative functions. For instance, iboogie sorts the results into
subcategories, while blekko claims to have spam free searching.
Here are the metasearch engines to choose to use in your
assignment:
• mrsapo
• iboogie
• ixquick
• Mamma
• Metacrawler
• Zapmeta
• Zuula

18. For more information about the chosen Search
Engines and Metasearch Engines connect to this
link:
http://www.internettutorials.net/engines.asp
I have checked all of the search engines and metasearch engines
that I have given you to use for assignments. At the time of this
creation, they all worked. However, looking at the link above
may give you information about your chosen source if it isn’t
working for you very well.

19. Readings
• This link has several tutorials linked to it. I would look through
what Southern Oregon University has linked to their web site
and glance through the tutorials for information. Depending
on your familiarity and comfort with this topic you may need
to spend more or less time. However, it is wise to look
through them even if you are exceedingly comfortable
searching because things on the web change by the moment.
And really, how much time have you spent really learning
about search engines and searching?
• http://hanlib.sou.edu/searchtools/howto.html