Search Engine Mortality & New Directions. Greg R. Notess

1
Search Engine Mortality New Directions

• Greg R. Notess
• Internet Librarian International
• London 28 March 2001

2
The State of Search

• Among the Global, Web-wide Engines
• Mortality
• Death of engines
• Death of functionality
• New Directions
• Database Expansion PDF, multimedia others

3
Mortality

• Search Engines are Disappearing
• Search features vanish or change

4
Death of Search Engines

• Infoseek RIP
• Go Goes GoTo
• Ultraseek to Inktomi
• Inference Find
• Metasearch
• Open Text Index
• Old Lycos Database
• WebCrawler
• Magellan

• DejaNews
• Remarq
• AltaVista Usenet

5
Death of Search Features

• Alt tag field search
• GONE
• Date on Googles cache
• GONE
• Deja Advanced Search Capabilities
• GONE

6
Death of the - System

• Change in default operations
• Multiple terms
• Default OR with Higher Ranking for Both
• Use to Require, - to Exclude
• Users Studies Cause Shift
• Default to AND (all but Excite and sometimes
  AltaVista)
• Now, has no function

7
But Inertia Impels

• Users have learned
• Beginning of adoption of in library systems
• The Google conundrum
• Not Needed
• Except for Stop Words
• But if used on non-stop words, all ignored

8
New Directions

• Changes in Database Structure
• Expanded Database Coverage

9
Underlying Database Structure

• Originally
• Word searching
• Crawler built
• Now
• Pay for inclusion, ranking
• Link analysis loss of text match
• Expanded Coverage

10
Expanded Database Coverage

• Multiple Databases
• News Headlines
• Shopping Links
• Phone Directory Matches
• Google PDF indexing Text versions

11
Expanded Database Coverage II

• Inktomi Index Connect
• Content Beyond Web Pages
• Submitted via XML Interchange
• Indexing by Meta Tags
• Multimedia Audio Files, Video Clips, etc.
• More Frequent Updates
• But Only for Some Content

12
Current State of Search Engines

• Everyone loves to hate search engines
• Everyone still uses them
• They now offer search access to hundreds of
  millions of fully indexed Web pages
• For free

13
And the future?

• Continued changes
• And some are even improvements!
• Lots of new research efforts
• Taxonomies
• Outsourcing
• Visual Representations
• And much, much more. . .