ABSTRACT
A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as SERPS, or "search engine results pages". The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human input. Web search engines work by storing information about many web pages, which they retrieve from the html itself. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated Web browser which follows every link on the site. Exclusions can be made by the use of robots.txt. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed (for example, words are extracted from the titles, headings, or special fields called meta tags). Data about web pages are stored in an index database for use in later queries. A query can be a single word. The purpose of an index is to allow information to be found as quickly as possible. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages, whereas others, such as AltaVista, store every word of every page they find. This cached page always holds the actual search text since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very useful when the content of the current page has been updated and the search terms are no longer in it.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CERTIFICATION PAGE
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
ABSTRACT
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
STATEMENT OF PROBLEM
PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
IMPORTANCE/SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
DEFINITION OF TERMS
ASSUMPTION OF THE STUDY
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
CHAPTER THREE
MODUS OPERANDI OF SEARCH ENGINES
SEARCH ENGINE BIAS
CHAPTER FOUR
INFORMATION RETRIEVAL IN SEARCH ENGINES
CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSION
5.1 LIMITATION OF THE STUDY
5.2 SUGGESTION FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
5.3 REFERENCES