The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to search engines:

computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits.

Contents

[edit] Nature of search engines

A search engine can be described as all of the following:

[edit] Essence of search engines

[edit] Types of search engines

  • Database search engine –
  • Desktop search engine –
  • Distributed search engine – search engine where there is no central server. Unlike traditional centralized search engines, work such as crawling, data mining, indexing, and query processing is distributed among several peers in decentralized manner where there is no single point of control.
  • Enterprise search engine – search engine employed on and for access to the information on an organization’s computer network.
  • Human search engine – uses human participation to filter the search results and assist users in clarifying their search request. The goal is to provide users with a limited number of relevant results, as opposed to traditional search engines that often return a large number of results that may or may not be relevant.
  • Hybrid search engine – uses different types of data with or without ontologies to produce the algorithmically generated results based on web crawling. Previous types of search engines only use text to generate their results.
  • Intelligent medical search engine
  • Metasearch engine – search tool[1] that sends user requests to several other search engines and/or databases and aggregates the results into a single list or displays them according to their source. Metasearch engines enable users to enter search criteria once and access several search engines simultaneously.
  • Organic search engine – manually operated search service which uses a combination of computer algorithms and human researchers to look up a search query. A search query submitted to an organic search engine is analysed by a human operator who researches the query then formats the response to the user.
  • Web search engine– designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as SERPS, or “search engine results pages”.
    • Audio search engine – web-based search engine which crawls the web for audio content.
    • Collaborative search engine – emerging trend for Web search and Enterprise search within company intranets. CSEs let users concert their efforts in information retrieval (IR) activities, share information resources collaboratively using knowledge tags, and allow experts to guide less experienced people through their searches.
    • Social search engine – type of web search that takes into account the Social Graph of the person initiating the search query.
    • Video search engine – web-based search engine which crawls the web for video content. Some video search engines parse externally hosted content while others allow content to be uploaded and hosted on their own servers.
  • Visual search engine – designed to search for information on the World Wide Web through the input of an image or a search engine with a visual display of the search results. Information may consist of web pages, locations, other images and other types of documents. This type of search engines is mostly used to search on the mobile Internet through an image of an unknown object (unknown search query).

[edit] Search-based applications

[edit] Specific search engines

[edit] By content/topic

[edit] General

[edit] P2P search engines

[edit] Metasearch engines

See also: Metasearch engine

[edit] Geographically limited scope

[edit] Accountancy

[edit] Business

[edit] Enterprise

See also: Enterprise search

[edit] Food/Recipes

[edit] Mobile/Handheld

[edit] Job

Main article: Job search engine

[edit] Legal

[edit] Medical

[edit] News

[edit] People

[edit] Real estate / property

[edit] Television

[edit] Video Games

[edit] By information type

Search engines dedicated to a specific kind of information

[edit] Forum

[edit] Blog

[edit] Multimedia

See also: Multimedia search

[edit] Source code

[edit] BitTorrent

These search engines work across the BitTorrent protocol.

[edit] Email

[edit] Maps

[edit] Price

[edit] Question and answer

[edit] Human answers
[edit] Automatic answers
See also: Question answering

[edit] Natural language

See also: Natural language search engine and Semantic search

[edit] By model

[edit] Open source search engines

[edit] Semantic browsing engines

[edit] Social search engines

See also: Social search, Relevance feedback, and Human search engine

[edit] Visual search engines

[edit] Search appliances

  • Google: Google Search Appliance

 

[edit] Desktop search engines

See also: Desktop search
Name Platform Remarks License
Autonomy Windows IDOL Enterprise Desktop Search. Proprietary, commercial
Beagle Linux Open source desktop search tool for Linux based on Lucene A mix of the Apache License
Copernic Desktop Search Windows Considered best overall search engine in 2005 UW benchmark study.[1] Free for home use
Docfetcher Cross-platform Open source desktop search tool for Windows and Linux, based on Apache Lucene Eclipse Public License
dtSearch Desktop Windows Proprietary (30 day trial)
Easyfind Mac OS Freeware
Everything Windows Find files and folders by name instantly on NTFS volumes Freeware
Google Desktop Linux, Mac OS, Windows Integrates with the main Google search engine page. 5.9 Release now supports x64 systems. As of September 14, 2011, Google has discontinued this product. Freeware
GNOME Storage Linux Open Source desktop search tool for Unix/Linux GPL
imgSeek Linux, Mac OS, Windows Desktop content-based image search GPL v2[2]
InSight Desktop Search Windows Metadata-based search utility Freeware
ISYS Search Software Windows ISYS:desktop search software. Proprietary (14 day trial)
Locate32 Windows Graphical port of Unix‘s locate & updatedb BSD License[3]
Meta Tracker Linux, Unix Open Source desktop search tool for Unix/Linux GPL v2[4]
Recoll Linux, Unix Open Source desktop search tool for Unix/Linux GPL[5]
Spotlight Mac OS Found in Tiger” and later OS X releases. Proprietary
Strigi Linux, Unix, Solaris, Mac OS X and Windows Cross-platform open source desktop search engine LGPL v2[6]
Terrier Search Engine Linux, Mac OS, Unix Desktop search for Windows, Mac OS X (Tiger), Unix/Linux. MPL
Tropes Zoom Windows Semantic Search Engine. Freeware and commercial
Windows Search Windows Part of Server 2003. Does not support indexing UNC paths on x64 systems. Proprietary, freeware

[edit] Usenet

[edit] Based on

[edit] Google

[edit] Bing

[edit] Ask.com

[edit] Acquired or defunct search engines

[edit] General search engine concepts

[edit] Persons influential in search engines

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ “Benchmark Study of Desktop Search Tools”. http://www.uwebi.org/reports/desktop_search.pdf. Retrieved 2008-03-10.
  2. ^ According to COPYING in SVN trunk on SourceForge.
  3. ^ According to http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/Servers/Database-Utils/Locate32.shtml
  4. ^ According to COPYING in SVN trunk.
  5. ^ According to [1].
  6. ^ According to COPYING in version 0.5.10 tar.bz2 package.

According to Goorbe

[edit] External links

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This article uses material from the Wikipedia article List of Search Engines, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.