Global Search Technologies

The matters are totally different, however, with the search engines working with the global network. Blind search definitely doesn’t fit here. Gigantic information volumes (even Yandex can boast indexing of over 11 terabytes of data), the pecularities of information organization and structuring, and the global chaos make simple search not only ineffective but also annoying and time-consuming. That’s why special emphasis has been made on developing new search optimization and improvement tools lately. But today that mechanism still remains quite basic (aside from private innovations of each separately taken system, that are kept secret) and hasn’t gone far from simple phrase search in the indexed document base with proper consideration of stemming and synonyms. This solution obviously works, though doesn’t solve all the problems. When reading dozens of articles on improving the quality of search with the help of, say, Google or Yandex, one can’t help but conclude that finding the needed document by the query without knowing the hidden features of the system is a matter of a few hours rather than one minute. The problem is that the final results will wholly depend on the query word set by the user. The fuzzier the query — the worse the quality of search. That’s the general rule.  

Of course, knowing and properly using the key functions of search engines and correctly selecting the query phrase can ensure the rational results, but that would be the fruit of corporate mental work of the user and time, spent on looking through all the irrelevant information which might still contain “hints” on how to upgrade the query. In short, you type a phrase, look through the results, see for yourself that the query wasn’t properly worded, type the new phrase…and so on and so forth till you reach a higher level relevancy of results. Yet even then, your chances of finding the needed document will remain quite low. As a rule, an average user won’t waste time on “advanced search” (although the array of it’s functions could’ve been helpful — selecting the language, file format, etc.). Wouldn’t it be great to just type a word/phrase and get what you need? And the way you get it doesn’t really matter. Perhaps it’s a bit irrelevant here, but Google has a function called “I’m feeling lucky”, which very well characterizes all existing technologies of search. And yet it’s still popular. That is, the technology does work. Maybe it’s not ideal and it’s usually not the way we’d want it to work, but if you consider the complexity of search in the chaos of internet and the volume of data, even that seems tolerable.