What is search engine - Wikipedia |
| News created: 8. september 2007 15:51 |
The most popular form of a search engine is a Web search engine which searches for information on the public World Wide Web. Other kinds of search engines include enterprise search engines, which search on intranets, personal search engines, and mobile search engines.
How search engines work
Search engines provide an interface to a group of items that enables users to specify criteria about an item of interest and have the engine find the matching items within the group.
In the most popular form of search, items are documents or web pages and the criteria are words or concepts that the documents may contain[1].
There are several varieties of syntax in which a search engine user can express a query. Some methods are formalized and require a strict, logical and algebraic syntax. Other approaches are less strict and allow for a less defined query. One form of a less-restricted query syntax is referred to as Natural Language Search, which is a term typically used to describe web search engines that apply natural language processing of some form. For example, instead of searching for one or two words, a query could consist of an English sentence or paragraph. A natural language search engine will then parse the query into words and evaluate searches for these words. This places less burden on the search engine user to formulate a specific query using restrictive, and sometimes difficult to learn, syntax. A second definition of natural language search engines reflects how the search engine performs indexing, unrelated to the query syntax. This requires a semantic understanding of the query in order to disambiguate the text. |
| businessglobe.com |
