Limitations of search engines

Limitations of Search EnginesBy Saliya Nugawela

Single most common misconception among the internet users is

that Google is the be-all and end-all of search.

Google has an important role to play in many search tasks, but it’s

only one tool of many that professional searchers rely on to get

accurate and timely answers to difficult questions.

Getting pass a dependence on Google and other search engines is a

main skill you need to learn in order to thrive as a searcher.

There’s a lot more useful information in the world than what search

engines can deliver.

As you all know, Internet is growing at lightning speed. The information stored

on the net is Enormous. Every second millions of bytes are added all over the

world. The immense data and knowledge on the net is growing at a mind-

blowing rate and even estimates are proven wrong every second.

Search Engines Index only a fraction of the web pages available on the web.

If a web page is not indexed, you will not see it in the Search Engine Results

Page (SERP).

The 1990s was the decade of the World Wide Web. Web is built over the

physical infrastructure of the Internet. Web radically changed the availability of

information and made possible the rapid dissemination of digital information

across the globe.

While the Internet is a physical network, connecting millions of computers

together globally, the Web is a virtual global network linking together a massive

amount of information. Search engines now index many billions of web pages

and that number is just a fraction of the totality of information we can access

on the Web, much of it residing in searchable databases not directly

accessible to search engines.

search engines are commercial enterprises. advertising is currently the bread

and butter of search services. As commercial enterprises, search engines are

responsible to their paying customers, most of whom are advertisers.

Therefore, the search results can be manipulated to satisfy their paying

customers.

Search engine optimization and visibility is currently a big business with many

companies offering ways to improve web site ranking. Thus, manipulating the

search results outcome.

Search engines do not index certain Web content mainly for the following

reasons:

1. The search engine does not know about the page. No one has submitted the

URL to the search engine and no pages currently covered by the search

engine have linked to it.

2. The search engines have decided not to index the content because it is too

deep in the site.

3. The search engine is asked not to index the content, by the presence of a

robots.txt file on the site that asks engines not to index the site, or specific

pages, or particular parts of the site.

4. The search engine does not have or does not utilize a technology that

would be required to index non-HTML content. This applies to files such as

images and audio files.

5. The search engine cannot get to the pages to index them because it

encounters a request for a password or the site has a search box that must

be filled out in order to get to the content.