Search Engine: The software that searches
an index and returns matches. Search engine is often used synonymously
with spider and index, although these are separate components
that work with the engine.
Spider: The software that scans documents
and adds them to an index by following links. Spider is often
used as a synonym for search engine.
Concept search: A search for documents related
conceptually to a word, rather than specifically containing
the word itself.
Full-text index: An index containing every
word of every document cataloged, including stop words (defined
below).
Fuzzy search: A search that will find matches
even when words are only partially spelled or misspelled.
Boolean search: A search allowing the inclusion
or exclusion of documents containing certain words through
the use of operators such as AND, NOT and OR.
Index: The searchable catalog of documents
created by search engine software. Also called "catalog."
Index is often used as a synonym for search engine. Index
is commonly pluralized as "indices." However, Search
Engine Watch instead uses the alternative plural form "indexes."
Keyword search: A search for documents containing
one or more words that are specified by a user.
Proximity search: A search where users to
specify that documents returned should have the words near
each other.
Query-By-Example: A search where a user
instructs an engine to find more documents that are similar
to a particular document. Also called "find similar."
Phrase search: A search for documents containing
a exact sentence or phrase specified by a user.
Precision: The degree in which a search
engine lists documents matching a query. The more matching
documents that are listed, the higher the precision. For example,
if a search engine lists 80 documents found to match a query
but only 20 of them contain the search words, then the precision
would be 25%.
Recall: Related to precision, this is the
degree in which a search engine returns all the matching documents
in a collection. There may be 100 matching documents, but
a search engine may only find 80 of them. It would then list
these 80 and have a recall of 80%.
Relevancy: How well a document provides
the information a user is looking for, as measured by the
user.
Stemming: The ability for a search to include
the "stem" of words. For example, stemming allows
a user to enter "swimming" and get back results
also for the stem word "swim."
Stop words: Conjunctions, prepositions and
articles and other words such as AND, TO and A that appear
often in documents yet alone may contain little meaning.
Thesaurus: A list of synonyms a search engine
can use to find matches for particular words if the words
themselves don't appear in documents.
Scooter
The name of the Altavista search engine's spider. . (The name
refers to the annual motorcycle races held at the famous AltaVista
Raceway)
Score
Many search engines use a number to track the relevance of
the document to the query, using TF-IDF, fuzzy matching, vectors,
or other algorithms. This is usually a number between 0 and
100 (or a percentage), between 1 and 10, between 0 and 1.
Some search engines always give their best matches the top
score and rate the others compared to that, while other engines
score documents compared to a theoretical perfect document.
In all cases, this works better with a long and sophisticated
query than a short one.
Many search engines treat retrieval and scoring as the same
thing: documents which do not match the query are simply ranked
at 0.
Script
A piece of programming designed to perform a certain function
on a web page - for example to create a rollover effect on
buttons or to create pop-ups.
Scroll (Down, Up, Left, Right)
Moving up or down within a document in your screen. Use scroll
bar at right. Click on arrow down or arrow up. Drag the scroll
button down or up. Or click on the page up or page down icons
at the bottom of the bar. If you need to scroll left or right,
use the scroll bar at the bottom.
SDSL
(Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line) A version of DSL where
the upload speeds and download speeds are the same.
See also: ADSL, DSL
Search
The process of locating information. On the Internet, this
is typically done by searching through documents in search
engines and directory databases.
Search Engine 1
A server or a collection of servers dedicated to indexing
internet web pages, storing the results and returning lists
of pages which match particular queries. The indexes are normally
generated using spiders. Some of the major search engines
are Altavista, Excite, Hotbot, Lycos, Northern Light and Webcrawler.
Note that Yahoo is a directory, not a search engine. The term
Search Engine is also often used to describe both directories
and search engines.
Search Engine 2
The software that searches an index and returns matches. Search
engine is often used synonymously with spider and index, although
these are separate components that work with the engine.
Search Engine 3
The program (CGI, Perl script, Java application or servlet,
server module or separate server) that accepts the request
from the form or URL, searches the index, and returns the
results list to the server.
Search Forms
HTML interface to the site search tool, provided for visitors
to enter their search terms and specify their preferences
for the search. Some tools provide pre-built forms.
Search hours
The actual amount of time (in hours) all visitors to a search
engine spent there during a given month. Audience reach and
search hours are the two major factors when calculating the
popularity of a search engine.
Search results
The documents returned by a search engine in response to a
query.
Search Terms
The search terms are the words entered by the searcher, which
are part of the query, along with other instructions. The
search engine will look for these words in the index, and
return the matching results, usually sorted by relevance.
Some search engines will allow Boolean operators, adjacency,
match phrases, partial words and provide other options.
Search tree
A seldom used synonym for a searchable directory.
Searchking
A comparatively small search engine. It's claim to fame is
that it allows users to vote on the relevance of documents
it returns for queries - and it then uses that data to continually
increase the accuracy of its search results. In September
2002 SearchKing was (according to them) penalized by Google.
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