Web search engines

This review looks briefly at the history of World Wide Web search engine development, considers the current state of affairs, and reflects on the future. Networked discovery tools have evolved along with Internet resource availability. World Wide Web search engines display some complexity in their variety, content, resource acquisition strategies, and in the array of tools they deploy to assist users. A small but growing body of evaluation literature, much of it not systematic in nature, indicates that performance effectiveness is difficult to assess in this setting. Significant improvements in general-content search engine retrieval and ranking performance may not be possible, and are probably not worth the effort, although search engine providers have introduced some rudimentary attempts at personalization, summarization, and query expansion. The shift to distributed search across multitype database systems could extend general networked discovery and retrieval to include smaller resource collections with rich metadata and navigation tools.