TOOL TIME

INDUS
July 2003 

 

 

 

 

   Home

   Editor's Footnote

   Dear Editor...

   Presidential Gavel
   STC News

   STC India Diary

   Member Profiles

   DS's Column

   About Us

   Archives
   Situations Vacant
   Networking
   Learning
 
   Book Review
   Website Review

Choosing the Right Search Engine

By M S Dattatreya

All of us who find it difficult to kick off the Web browsing habit have one thing in common – and that is our overt dependency on Search engines. There is yet another category of users who are invariably addicted to search engines and these are eCommerce Managers. These people appreciate search tools as an important and critical component of their sites. Forrester Research, in one of its research papers, found out that this number brink around a whopping 68%.  The reason is simple…

Just imagine a user trying to find a product from out of 15,000 such variants or an apparel distributor trying to find an apparel from out of 2000 items that are only known by their names...the list goes on. These are instances of firms trying to sell their wares to someone halfway around the planet.

Now, let us consider the case of an information seeker trying to locate information using keywords through a search engine. Much to the chagrin of the user, the search results often display irrelevant content, do not account for synonyms or misspellings, and display results haphazardly.

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

Technical Communication in the Storage Management Industry

Seven habits for successful freelancing

Needless to Say - Part 4

The Which Hunt

Using Dreamweaver to Create
e-Learning

Celebrating Technical Communication – STC’s 50th Annual Conference

Book Review: Bugs in Writing

Website Review: Gary Conroy's Site

There are many reasons for this sorry state of affairs.  Some of them are:

  • Choosing the wrong search engine: You end up having a search utility that does not correct and account for linguistic anomalies with features like stemming and phrase analysis.

  • Most search engines work with metadata, titles and descriptions.  Having redundant or vague information for all these page elements mean displaying information that sucks.

  • Search is often based on intricate search algorithms.  If these are not optimized, you will find highly relevant results buried among less relevant results.

Thus there are many such key issues that hound today’s search engines. Elaborating on each of these is beyond the scope of this review. I found the following search engines and search engine solution providers as truly innovative with their offerings.  While the solution providers provide some useful insights into search technologies, the Internet search engines continue to develop new ways of staying on top. 

I have personally found Google as the most innovative among search engine.  In the computer engineer’s parlance it is sometimes labeled “GOD”!  As a matter of fact Google has outgrown the expectations of the two Stanford grads Sergey Brin and Larry Page.  Incidentally, Google started as a semi-serious boast about the amount of information it would be able to search and today it holds information seekers in raptures. Every avid web surfer would surely not miss visiting labs.google.com.  This page showcases the real future of search engines!  Some key website that might be of some interest are listed.

(M S Dattatreya, is the Senior Documentation Manager, Mind Tree Consulting, Bangalore. He can be contacted at dattatreyams@mindtree.com.)

STC India | Home | Contact Us

Copyright © 2003 India Chapter STC. All rights reserved.