Algorithmic Aspects of Web Search Engines

Abstract

Web search engines have emerged as one of the central applications on the internet. In fact, search has become one of the most important activities that people engage in on the Internet. Even beyond becoming the number one source of information, a growing number of businesses are depending on web search engines for customer acquisition. In this talk I will brief review the history of web search engines: The first generation of web search engines used text-only retrieval techniques. Google revolutionized the field by deploying the PageRank technology - an eigenvector-based analysis of the hyperlink structure- to analyze the web in order to produce relevant results. Moving forward, our goal is to achieve a better understanding of a page with a view towards producing even more relevant results. Google is powered by a large number of PCs. Using this infrastructure and striving to be as efficient as possible poses challenging systems problems but also various algorithmic challenges. I will discuss some of them in my talk. © Springer-Verlag 2004.