Download Search Engine Panel

Search Engine
Mortality & New
Directions
Greg R. Notess
Internet Librarian International
London 28 March 2001
The State of Search
Among the Global, Web-wide Engines:
Mortality


Death of engines
Death of functionality
New Directions:

Database Expansion: PDF, multimedia & others
Mortality
Search Engines are Disappearing
Search features vanish or change
Death of Search Engines
Infoseek RIP


Go Goes GoTo
Ultraseek to Inktomi
Inference Find

Metasearch
Open Text Index
Old Lycos Database
WebCrawler
Magellan
DejaNews
Remarq
AltaVista Usenet
Death of Search
Features
Alt tag field search

GONE
Date on Google’s cache

GONE
Deja Advanced Search Capabilities

GONE
Death of the + - System
Change in default operations
Multiple terms
 Default OR with Higher Ranking for Both
 Use + to Require, - to Exclude

Users Studies Cause Shift

Default to AND (all but Excite and
sometimes AltaVista)
Now, + has no function
But Inertia Impels
Users have learned
Beginning of adoption of + in library
systems
The Google conundrum
+ Not Needed
 Except for Stop Words
 But if used on non-stop words, all ignored

New Directions
Changes in Database Structure
Expanded Database Coverage
Underlying Database
Structure
Originally
Word searching
 Crawler built

Now
Pay for inclusion, ranking
 Link analysis = loss of text match
 Expanded Coverage

Expanded Database
Coverage
Multiple Databases
News Headlines
 Shopping Links
 Phone Directory Matches

Google: PDF indexing & Text versions
Expanded Database
Coverage II
Inktomi Index Connect
Content Beyond Web Pages
 Submitted via XML Interchange
 Indexing by Meta Tags
 Multimedia: Audio Files, Video Clips, etc.

More Frequent Updates

But Only for Some Content
Current State of Search
Engines
Everyone loves to hate search engines
Everyone still uses them
They now offer search access to
hundreds of millions of fully indexed
Web pages

For free
And the future?
Continued changes

And some are even improvements!
Lots of new research efforts
Taxonomies
 Outsourcing
 Visual Representations
 And much, much more. . .
