Chapter 10

Search Strategies for Search

Engine
In this chapter, you will learn
about:
1. The major search engine databases on the WWW
2. Common search features
3. Boolean operators
4. Phrase Search
5. Proximity Search
6. Field Search
7. Limit by date Search
8. Output features common to most search Engines
a. Relevancy Ranking
b. Annotations or Summaries
c. Results per page
d. Sorting Results
 The major search engine databases on the WWW

Categories of search engine software include:

• Web search or full-text search (e.g. Lucene).
• Database or structured data search (e.g. Dieselpoint).
• Mixed or enterprise search (e.g. Google Search Appliance).

The largest online directories, such as Google and Yahoo,

utilize thousands of computers to process billions of website
documents using web crawlers or spiders (software),
returning results for thousands of searches per second.
Processing high query volumes requires software to run in a
distributed environment with redundancy.
 Common search features
Search Engine features are:
• Optimize Meta tags
• Prioritize pages in website navigation
• Increase site speed
• Implement Tracking on your site
• Fresh high quality content
• Mobile customization
 How do search engines work?
Search engines have three primary functions:
Crawl: Scour the Internet for content, looking over the
code/content for each URL they find.
Index: Store and organize the content found during the
crawling process. Once a page is in the index, it’s in the
running to be displayed as a result to relevant queries.
Rank: Provide the pieces of content that will best answer
a searcher's query, which means that results are ordered
by most relevant to least relevant.
 What is RankBrain?
• RankBrain is the machine learning component of Google’s core algorithm.
• Machine learning is a computer program that continues to improve its
predictions over time through new observations and training data.
• In other words, it’s always learning, and because it’s always learning, search
results should be constantly improving.
• For example, if RankBrain notices a lower ranking URL providing a better
result to users than the higher ranking URLs, you can bet that RankBrain will
adjust those results, moving the more relevant result higher and demoting
the lesser relevant pages as a byproduct.
 Boolean Operators
Boolean Operators are used to connect and define the
relationship between your search terms. When
searching electronic databases, you can use Boolean
operators to either narrow or broaden your record
sets. The three Boolean operators are AND, OR and
NOT.
 Phrase Search
Phrase Search is a type of search that allows users
to search for documents containing an exact sentence
or phrase rather than comparing a set of keywords in
random order.

Google might return results including the phrase, but it will

also return results that include all those words but not
necessarily in that exact order. When you want to
search for an exact phrase, you should enclose the
entire phrase in quotation marks.
 Proximity Search

In text processing, a proximity

search looks for documents where two or
more separately matching term
occurrences are within a specified
distance, where distance is the number of
intermediate words or characters.
 Field Search
Field searching lets you tell a database exactly where you
want your keywords to be found.

"Fields" are the various pieces of information that library

databases (like Summon, EBSCO, ProQuest, etc.) keep for
each item that they search. For every article or book, things like
title, author, subject terms, abstract, date, etc. are recorded in
their own field. Each time you search for a keyword, the
database looks for it in the fields.
 Limit by date Search
• You can filter and customize your search
results to find exactly what you want. For
example, you can find sites updated within
the last 24 hours, or photos of a certain
colour.
Output features common to
most search Engines

a.Relevancy Ranking
b.Annotations or Summaries
c.Results per page
d.Sorting Results
Relevancy Ranking
Results per page

Sorting Results