Jenny Townes

Week 9 Reading Notes

1. How the material helped

The first site was very helpful in explaining why one doesn't search all of the internet with a search engine. It helped elucidate one of the earlier reading regarding spiders and servers. I didn't know that Yahoo! was any different from Google.
I found the second site to be very helpful as well.
The site on search engines explained exactly how spiders work, which, along with the first site, answered questions I had from earlier readings. I think I finally understand meta data. AskJeeves is a website I use all the time and I had been wondering why it seemed to come up with better answers than other sites. It is good to know about concept-based searches and natural language queries.
Of them all, I liked this site the best. This was odd since I already knew most of these things, but the author set them in out in such a matter-of-fact, clear way that I'd never read before. I liked finding out about alexa.com. I didn't know there was a place on the net at which you could monitor another website.

2. What I didn't understand

I don't really understand encoding or hashing.

3. Additional questions

• Is a search engine located on a server like all other web material? Do the servers need to be large?
• This site says Google uses up to four spiders at a time. Is this a lot? How do you find out how many spiders a web crawler uses?
• What does robot exclusion protocol look like?