Introduction to Web Site Development

For a long time it looked like Google had the search engine competition closed up, but now there seems to be new activity. A few weeks ago a completely new search engine was released, called Wolfram|Alpha. Interestingly it seems to take a step back and use people to catalog the best information. It does not return millions of sites for a search term, but is meant to give answers to factual questions. Here is a report on it.

At the same time, Microsoft is ready to start their new search engine called Bing. I don’t know much about it yet, but both of these new entries try to address the fact that people want answers to their questions from the search engines and not just a huge list of related sites (although Google is awfully good at that).

Trying to decipher the meaning of the content of web pages (to produce better search results) is very difficult, since a search engine can mostly find words that are on the pages but not really the relationships between the terms on the page. This issue is at the heart of the semantic web, the attempt to restructure the information in web pages so that the meaning and relationships of terms are recognizable by machines. It is a very challenging task that will take a lot of time to complete, but there are some intermediate steps that can be taken now. In a future post, I will look at Microformats, which are a simple, but promising idea.