1. Search Engine Mortality & New Directions
Greg R. Notess
Internet Librarian International
London 28 March 2001

2. The State of Search Among the Global, Web-wide Engines: Mortality
Death of engines
Death of functionality
New Directions:
Database Expansion: PDF, multimedia & others

3. Mortality Search Engines are Disappearing
Search features vanish or change

4. Death of Search Engines
Infoseek RIP
Go Goes GoTo
Ultraseek to Inktomi
Inference Find
Metasearch
Open Text Index
Old Lycos Database
WebCrawler
Magellan
DejaNews
Remarq
AltaVista Usenet

5. Death of Search Features
Alt tag field search
GONE
Date on Google’s cache
Deja Advanced Search Capabilities

6. Death of the + - System Change in default operations
Multiple terms
Default OR with Higher Ranking for Both
Use + to Require, - to Exclude
Users Studies Cause Shift
Default to AND (all but Excite and sometimes AltaVista)
Now, + has no function

7. But Inertia Impels Users have learned
Beginning of adoption of + in library systems
The Google conundrum
+ Not Needed
Except for Stop Words
But if used on non-stop words, all ignored

8. New Directions Changes in Database Structure
Expanded Database Coverage

9. Underlying Database Structure
Originally
Word searching
Crawler built
Now
Pay for inclusion, ranking
Link analysis = loss of text match
Expanded Coverage

10. Expanded Database Coverage
Multiple Databases
News Headlines
Shopping Links
Phone Directory Matches
Google: PDF indexing & Text versions

11. Expanded Database Coverage II
Inktomi Index Connect
Content Beyond Web Pages
Submitted via XML Interchange
Indexing by Meta Tags
Multimedia: Audio Files, Video Clips, etc.
More Frequent Updates
But Only for Some Content

12. Current State of Search Engines
Everyone loves to hate search engines
Everyone still uses them
They now offer search access to hundreds of millions of fully indexed Web pages
For free

13. And the future? Continued changes Lots of new research efforts
And some are even improvements!
Lots of new research efforts
Taxonomies
Outsourcing
Visual Representations
And much, much more. . .