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Excerpt: The success of a search engine algorithm lies in its ability to retrieving information for a given query. There are two ways in which one might consider the return of results to be successful. Either you can obtain very accurate results or you can find many results which have some connection with the search query. In information retrieval, these are termed precision and recall, respectively. The precision is defined as the fraction of retrieved documents that are relevant. Recall is defined as the fraction of relevant documents that are retrieved.This might seem like the distinction between the Judian People’s Front and…

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Excerpt: Cloaking is the practice of showing a different web page to search engine bots than to your visitors in an attempt to distort rankings. The hope on the part of the cloaker is that the search engine can be shown a rich variety of content which contains the keywords they would like to be ranked for. For example a flash site that sends textual content to the search engines. This is practice is considered to be black-hat and if detected would lead to search engine retribution. So how do the search engines detect cloaked websites? When a search engine indexes…

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Excerpt: Introduction Although Google celebrated its tenth birthday only a few months ago. Search engines have existed in one form or another since 1990. It is interesting to see how search engines have evolved to cope with with the exponential growth of the internet. Archie The first search engine was called Archie written by Alan Emtage.  At this time the World Wide Web was in development. It was an FTP search engine and gathered its data by logging on to the sites that it knew about and indexed the data. A similar protocol to FTP called Gopher also spawned its own search engines, called…