Chapter 3

Shopping bot

an online price comparison software tool which automatically searches the products of many different online stores to locate the most affordable rates for customers.

Boolean operator

are used to connect and define the relationship between your search terms. When searching electronic databases, you can use Boolean operators to either narrow or broaden your record sets. The three Boolean operators are AND, OR and NOT.

Primary source

the first place research appears. In sciences that means published journal articles (also called papers). In Computer Science, the original code behind the research can also be considered a primary source in the same way that Hamlet is a primary source to someone studying English Literature.

Invisible Web

the part of the World Wide Web, which is not indexable by search engines and is therefore invisible. In contrast to the Surface Web, the Invisible Web consists of data and information that cannot be searched with search engines for various reasons.

Surface Web

the portion of the World Wide Web that is readily available to the general public and searchable with standard web search engines.

Keyword

word that is reserved by a program because the word has a special meaning. Keywords can be commands or parameters. Every programming language has a set of keywords that cannot be used as variable names. Keywords are sometimes called reserved names .

Search engine

a program that searches for and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user, used especially for finding particular sites on the World Wide Web.

Open-ended search

A search query that asks a general or broad question.

Yellow pages directory

A Web site that provides information about businesses, such as a description, address, phone number, Web site address, and reviews.

White pages directory

A Web site you use to locate people, and obtain their postal address, phone number, and email address.

Search results list

A group of records that meet the search criteria in a database query. Also called a "result set." (2) A group of Web page addresses and brief summaries of the pages' content that meet the search criteria of a search engine query. See organic search results.

Shopping aggregator

Shopping search engines that aggregate, or collect, information about consumer products or services, and help online shoppers compare models, prices, shipping costs, and other variables from various sellers before they buy.

Social media aggregator

Specialized search engines used to locate social media resources.

Deep Web

The deep web, invisible web, or hidden web are parts of the World Wide Web whose contents are not indexed by standard web search engines. The opposite term to the deep web is the surface web, which is accessible to anyone using the Internet.

Hit

The number of times a program or item of data has been accessed or matches some condition. For example, when you download a page from the Web, the page itself and all graphic elements that it contains each count as one hit to that website.

Drilling down

access data which is in a lower level of a hierarchically structured database.

Bot

an autonomous program on a network (especially the Internet) that can interact with computer systems or users, especially one designed to respond or behave like a player in an adventure game.

Wiki

a Web site that allows users to add and update content on the site using their own Web browser.

Stop word

a commonly used word (such as "the") that a search engine has been programmed to ignore, both when indexing entries for searching and when retrieving them as the result of a search query.

Directory

a file system cataloging structure which contains references to other computer files, and possibly other directories. On many computers, directories are known as folders, or drawers, analogous to a workbench or the traditional office filing cabinet.

Breadcrumb trail

a graphical control element frequently used as a navigational aid in user interfaces and on web pages. It allows users to keep track and maintain awareness of their locations within programs, documents, or websites.

Search text box

a graphical control element used in computer programs, such as file managers or web browsers, and on web sites.

Broken link

a link on a web page that no longer works because the website is encountering one or more of the reasons below. An improper URL entered for the link by the website owner. The destination website removed the linked web page (causing what is known as a 404 error)

Index

a method of sorting data by creating keywords or a listing of the data. A great example of an index of Computer Hope's hardware listing. ... When referring to the Internet or web pages, an index is a file named as index.htm, index.html, index.asp, or index.php.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP) — including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.

Web crawler

a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. This process is called Web crawling or spidering. Many legitimate sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data.

Crawler

a program that systematically browses the World Wide Web in order to create an index of data.

Search query

a query based on a specific search term that a user enters into a web search engine to satisfy his or her information needs. Web search queries are distinctive in that they are often plain text or hypertext with optional search-directives (such as "and"/"or" with "-" to exclude).

Targeted search

a search query that asks a specific question

Metasearch engine

a search tool that uses another search engine's data to produce its own results from the Internet. Metasearch engines take input from a user and simultaneously send out queries to third party search engines for results.

Natural language search

a search using regular spoken language, such as English. Using this type of search you can ask the database a question or you can type in a sentence that describes the information you are looking for.

Search engine algorithms

a set of rules, or a unique formula, that the search engine uses to determine the significance of a web page, and each search engine has its own set of rules.

Spider

a software program that travels the Web (hence the name "spider"), locating and indexing websites for search engines. ... These programs constantly browse the Web, traveling from one hyperlink to another. For example, when a spider visits a website's home page, there may be 30 links on the page.

Meta tag keywords

a specific type of meta tag that appear in the HTML code of a Web page and help tell search engines what the topic of the page is.

Hashtag

a type of metadata tag used on social networks such as Twitter and other microblogging services, allowing users to apply dynamic, user-generated tagging which makes it possible for others to easily find messages with a specific theme or content.

Full-text searching

refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full-text database. Full-text search is distinguished from searches based on metadata or on parts of the original texts represented in databases.