Search Engines

Abstract

It has been a little more than 25 years since the internauts first had the opportunity to search for documents of interest to them on the newly created Web (1991) by specifying a sequence of keywords. The context was very different from the present one: there were just a few internauts and the Web consisted of only a few million well-maintained and reliable documents (aka pages) belonging to governmental or university sites. The search engines of the era, whose names such asWanderer and Aliweb are now forgotten, were based on extremely elementary algorithms for searching for the user-specified keywords through meta-information that the authors of the pages had associated to them. The search proceeded on the words contained in the archived pages using a linear scan similar to that described in Chapter 3: this was possible due to the limited number of pages existing on the Web at that time and the queries sent to the search engine.