The Search Engine has perhaps become the most common method of Web Site? Navigation. It solves the problem of Information Retrieval?.


Arguably more people visit a Web Site? by referral from one of the major search engines, like Google, than navigate directly to a page by starting at the Home Page and then following Hyper Links? (Navigation) or a Drill Down Path? to a particular web page.

A good Search Engine is a critical part of a Content Management System. It may be built in to the CMS or provided as a service like Atomz or Verity.

The Search Engine uses programs called spiders or bots to crawl the web (or a single website), following the Hyper Links? found on each and every page it discovers. It puts these Hyper Links? in a giant database.

A Full Text Search? builds an index of all the words (and their associated pages), and then rates pages, generally by the number of times the terms in the query appear on a page.

An Advanced Search? uses Meta Data to narrow the search or evaluate the pages differently.

Google's Page Rank evaluates a page based on the number of other pages with Hyper Links? to the target page (and the Page Rank of those referring pages).

When a Search Engine returns a large number of pages (ideally all available) with the query terms, it is said to have high Recall?. When the returned pages are relevant to the query, it is called high Precision?.

A Thesaurus can enhance the Search Engine by expanding the query to include a Broader Term, a Narrower Term, a Related Term, perhaps an Equivalent Term? (that may include common misspellings). This can greatly increase Recall? and Precision?.