Reviewing the different portals and their search engines

Over the past few years, what essentially started out as search engines, have now become Internet portals. Originally Yahoo! was designed as a directory that could help users search the Internet for any information that they were looking for. Now, in addition to including a "Search box" prominently on its home page, Yahoo! also provides numerous links and services for its user population, including: chat rooms, stock quotes, retailing locations, travel services, and much more. It has become a portal, or gateway, for Internet users.

Webopedia defines a Web portal as "a Web site or service that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, and on-line shopping malls. The first Web portals were online services, such as AOL, that provided access to the Web, but by now most of the traditional search engines have transformed themselves into Web portals to attract and keep a larger audience."

Today, although there is a clear distinction between portals and search engines, you will often hear the terms used interchangeably. However, you should be aware that some portals, like HotBot and GoTo.com use
the same search engine technology created by Inktomi. For example, when you search for the keyword "OfficeLinks" in these two portals, their search engines return the same or a similar listing of results.

Key differences between search engines

Just as most portals are different, so are most search engines. For instance, when you enter search keywords like "online business planning" in Yahoo!, you will notice that the search result is completely different than when you enter the same keywords in Excite. These differences are explained by the methods that the search engines use to assemble, index and rank their databases.

According to Webopedia, a search engine is "a program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found." Think of a search engine as a large spreadsheet, with Web addresses going down the left hand side and keywords at the top, as follows:

If you were to type in the keyword "Computer" for this particular search engine, the results would show that www.bizsite.com and www.computersite.com have Web pages that contain the word computer. Additionally, in this hypothetical example, the www.computersite.com listing would be shown first in the search result because the word computer is used twice: once on its Web page and once in its URL.

Search engines create their databases using spiders, eyeballs, or a combination of the two. A spider is a computer program that automatically crawls across the Web, from link to link, and sends information back to the search engine for indexing and ranking. One of the first search engines to use this technology is appropriately called Webcrawler. Other popular search engines that use this technology include: AltaVista, Excite, and HotBot.

At the other extreme, are search engines that use eyeballs to create their databases and indexes. These human eyeballs review and categorize Web sites according to specific guidelines. For instance, Yahoo! creates its online directory using human surfers with eyeballs as described below:

In reality, most search engine databases are created with some combination of spiders and eyeballs. For example, most search engines have spiders that traverse the Web looking for new and updated Web pages. Where appropriate, these pages may be reviewed by a set of eyeballs before they are entered into the database.