How Do Search Engines Work

What I know
 There are way to many search engines like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, Ask etc. and there are also themed search engines like for example some are related to medicine, business,etc.

What I want to learn

• How do they work?
• How do they gather information?

Links

• http://www.searchengineguide.com/gallianno-cosme/how-do-search-engines-work.php
• http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-do-internet-search-en
• http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/may01/liddy.htm

What I learned

• Major elements of search engines: Crawlers/Spiders, Index & Software.

• Steps:
• Steps 1-3: Preprocessing 
• Step 4: Identify elements to index
• Step 5: Deleting stop words
• Step 6: Term Stemming
• Step 7: Extract index entries
• Step 8: Term weight assignment
• Step 9: Create index

• Crawlers read pages and follows the links on them.

• Crawlers: Googlebot (Google), Slurp (Yahoo!),  MSNBot (MSN Search)

• Crawlers go through all the webpages on the big index (database)

• Website owners can avoid having their websites being crawled daily by using a robot.txt.file.

• A software program called crawler is used to collect web pages. It retrieves extract words to be later stored with their corresponding website link in a index file.

• The users' inquiries are matched with the index file.

• To reduce search time, a data structured called tree is used. It duplicates the index list on computers in the search engine.

• Search engines use ranking methods like term-frequency-inverse document-frequency (TFIDF) to prioritize the results of a user's search.

• Another method is the link analysis, which is the Google uses. This method consists identifying if a webpage is an authority or a hub.

• To be able to hold billions of webpages and have access to them in matter of seconds, search engines construct data centers all over the world.

Summary

 I have to confess, I am a daily Google user. I have always found it amusing how fast search engines give us precise results, but I never really researched or ever wonder how complex their process is. It's nice to find out more about something you may use/see everyday without thinking it has a big story behind. 

Questions

1. Which is the best search engine?  (or is it Google I suppose?)

College Exploration on Naviance

Universities	Berkeley	Penn State	University of Hawaii at Manoa	University of Wisconsin-Madison
Location	Berkeley, California	University Park, Pennsylvania	Honolulu, Hawaii	Madison, Wisconsin
Ethnicity/Diversity	High	Typical	High	Typical
School Type	Traditional College/University	Traditional College/University	Traditional College/University	Traditional College/University
Getting In	3/18       I      21%	12/19     I      76%	1/1            I         67%	2/6         I       66%
College Towns	No	Yes	No	Yes
Gender Mix	Coed	Coed	Coed	Coed
Religious Affiliation	None	None	None	None

Greek Life                Yes                          Yes                          Yes                              Yes
Average GPA           3.88                         3.56                         3.4                               3.6



GPA 1st Quarter: 3.7

• University of California at Berkeley - 3.88
• Pennsylvania State University - 3.56
• University of Hawaii at Manoa - 3.4
• University of Wisconsin - 3.6

What I learned
  At the beginning, I really had a perfect fairytale in my mind going to an Ivy League college. Now, after doing a little research and listening to what Ms. Shawn  had to say I looked for other colleges. I didn't include my personal list because that was to far fetched... the four universities on my chart are completely different to what I was thinking before. I am a good and dedicated student but I also want my life out of school so I'm not focusing on Ivy League now.

Google Day 4

Goals

1. Continue to learn how to create my own furniture.
2. Watch more video tutorials.
3. Apply what I learned on Google SketchUp.

Links

• Tutorials: http://www.sketchup.com/intl/es/training/videos/new_to_gsu.html

Evidence

Today I finished making my own table.

I made its legs and front...

Later I added some details like making the front being in an arc shape and two drawers.

 I wanted to continue watching video tutorials for advanced techniques in SketchUp, but I had trouble with the video for building furniture and also with SketchUp and I had to start over several times.

Next Class

• Prepare my presentation.

Google Day 3

Goals

1. Continue adding details to the interior of the house
2. Watch more video tutorials
3. Apply what I learned on Google SketchUp
4. Learn how to add furniture to my room
5. Learn how to create my own furniture

Links

• Tutorials: http://www.sketchup.com/intl/es/training/videos/new_to_gsu.html

Evidence

Today, I finished the details of the room I started last class. I painted the walls and floor. At the end I also added some furniture from the 3D Warehouse.

When I finished I started making a small table. Right now I only have the top of it.

For the next Google Day

• Finish my own piece of furniture
• Start preparing my project