1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

Online research and reporting 75
Some examples of search engines are:
AltaVista (www.altavista.com) or its sister engine Raging
Search (raging.com);
Google (www.google.com);
Hotbot (www.hotbot.com); and
Northern Light (www.northernlight.com).
(Note: the URLs do not contain many surprises.)
Each engine provides a box to type in the ‘keywords’ of the
material you are looking for. Your choice of these keywords plays
a large part in the success of your search. Normally, the engine
will scan web pages looking for meta data that matches your
keywords. Meta data is part of the HTML code for each web page,
inserted by the page’s author but hidden from view unless you
look for it. If you want to see what HTML, including meta data,
looks like, open a web page using your web browser, click on the
‘View’ option on your toolbar and then ‘Source’. What you will
then see is all the HTML used to make that one web page. Much
of the HTML will be describing how the information on the page
should be organized but some of it will be information about the
page itself, including date, subject, author and content description.
This is the meta data.
If the engine thinks the page is one you want, it will add it to a
list and show you it, together with the hypertext link to take you
to the actual page and site.
The most important thing to understand about search engines
is that they are all different. The more you know about their
differences, the greater will be your success when you use
them.
Search engines do not scour the web ‘live’ when you make a
query. Instead, they search large databases of web pages they
have compiled. Different engines have different sizes of databases,
frequency of updating and methods of indexing. They also
have different methods of searching.
However, considering that the Web currently has an estimated
billion pages, no search engine will look everywhere on the
Web.