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Building a Search Engine: Considerations

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=988407

Difference Between Google’s and Bing’s Algorithm

Building a search engine is a massive undertaking. It takes a lot of careful thought and processing power. The first article at the top of this post brings to light some of the core issues that developers face when tackling such a problem.

An important part of a search engine is a crawler – a program that reads and organizes existing pages on the internet. This list of information will need to be processed with some intricate algorithms so that relevant information will be available to be served to users’ queries. This process can be lengthy, and how exactly it’s implemented varies across search engines. According to the second article, Bing’s method processes the information in such a way that older web pages emerge having higher authority than younger in search results, which is different than Google’s, who’s implementation focuses on bringing newer results to the top. No matter the method of approaching the problem, billions of constant user requests and web pages need to be organized and handled efficiently.

Interestingly, the first link says that in the early stages of search engine development, the Page Rank system is not always the most effective approach – the article brings up the fact that such a system requires massive computational power. This corresponds to what we have learned in class – using such a system would mean analyzing a massive network. The article says to instead focus on other elements of a web page that are key to its relevancy – HTML content and so forth.

The second article highlights some differences between the Google and Bing search engine systems and provides some interesting insight into factors that influence a web page’s power. Some of these were mentioned in class and this article went a little more in depth – some essential factors include HTML content (as previously mentioned) – which keywords are contained in which HTML elements and so forth – and also other types of web material, like Adobe Flash applications (which apparently the Bing algorithm has an affinity for), and how a query might be more relevant to a website with such content.

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