Search Engines

THE WEB GOES LIVE FOR BUSINESS
In the early days of the Internet, Yahoo’s directory service was the way we surfed the web because it was still indexable and classifiable by human editors. But the web grew too fast for this to last. The first-generation of search engines such as Altavista, Lycos, Webcrawler and Excite mirrored the pages on the web and provided textual search capabilities on the documents. It was good for a short while, until spammers figured out how to infiltrate the system. For a while, it seemed we would need to go back to maintaining bookmarks and remembering URLs to go to different sites. And then along come Google with its PageRank technology, which enabled search based on the importance of pages as measured by incoming links. Search was back in vogue—and has stayed that way ever since.
Much of the web that we see around us is the Reference Web. The content is mostly static. Pretty much anything digital will be accessible at our fingertips, if it is not already so. It is like being in a large digital library. Millions of websites have aggregated all kinds of information and made it available for anyone, mostly for free. More than a decade of enhancements in publishing technology has also made it simple for users to add to the treasure trove that’s already out there.