Write your abstract here.The internet, from being a pregorative of a country(read the US Army), has seeped into the lives
of everyone around the world. Every piece of info one requires is stored somewhere in the form of bits and bytes on a complex maze of web pages that make the internet. There's no exact figure on the total number of web pages out there but even a casual estimate would eventually run into tens and hundreds of billions.Retrieving the required info from so many pages and getting it to the user would be a a mammoth task but thanks to search
engines(google being the most popular of the lot), the process has been simplified. Lets find out how this whole process works.Search engines can be categorized into two types: Crawler-based & Directory -based.A Crawler-based search engine eemployes sofware known as "spiders" or "webbots". These spiders crawl through the web, collecting links found in the web pages as the source for continuing further searches. All the pages referred by the links are stored in a database of indices that relate to the textual contents of the pages.This index is then used for displaying the page that match the queries entered by the user.Directory-based search engines are totally human driven. Here, a directory containing the links of the web pages is maintained by the webmaster, where links to web pages can be proivided by the webmasters or the people reviewing that particular site.The success of a search engine is measured by the relevance of its search
results. After all, one would like to find the info as fast as possible. It has to be specific, containing the exact phrase the user is looking for. This final job of displaying the search results in your web browser is handled by the page -ranking component of a search engine.Although the exact details of the algorithms deployed by search engines are not publicly available, the manner in which the results are dispalyed gives us some insight into the criteria used for page ranking.These could be the heading of the web page, links of titles within a web page, etc.The golden rule is that a page gets listed only if it has original quality content.Although the current lot of search engines(google, altavista, a9, etc.) are quite efficient at retrieving results, they still lag behind when it comes to interpretingthe actual content of the user. For example, if a user has typed "windows", hoping to get a listing of prices and styles for windows to be fitted in his house, he would probably get a page full of results relating to " Microsoft Windows". Eventually the user has to sieve through hundreds of web pages before he could actually get the relevant answer.This is the area where all the search engines are concentrating at present-personalization. To keep a tab on what a particular person is looking for, search engines need to track the surfing habits of the user.That means we have to part with some of our privacy to obtain the correct results. If a search engine were smart enough to notice that a particular user sieved through hundreds of incorrect search results and selected the one he was looking for -it could save this info linked to that particular user. Therefore, the next time the user types in a similar query, it could throw up more relevant results. There are endless possibilites of enhancement search engines and over a period of time,future search engines , evolving continously, could make today's generation of search engines look outdated.