Talk:Search engine (computing)

"500 GB HDDs at $100 each"? According to New Egg, the cheapest 500 GB HDD is $342. Correct me if I'm wrong. --Laneb2005

I agree that costs, in general, are highly questionable, so I added editorial note:

"[ Costs here are questionable/dated: see Discussion-Tab...]" at Storage Costs 05-May-2006.

Years should be added to prices to remain accurate, just as most issues about

search-engines are fast-paced, time-sensitive, rapidly changing. --sbs May-2006

Cost of reliable 300Gb hard drive is around $1000. I am running search engine, and I know exactly how quickly one can get overheated, cheap harddrives make a lot of "block corruption" during high load. Add to it reliable cooling system, controller, and you will quickly get $10000 price per basic single-CPU system. Google runs on IBM Blades, average cost of CPU+HDD+etc. = $10000. Additionally, search engines need a lot: Google Analytics, Google Toolbar, some other sources, archives of information, etc. Yes, 100 computers are enough to index the web, but not enough to categorize it. Funtick 00:12, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Researchers at NEC Research Institute have improved upon Google's patented PageRank technology by using web crawlers to find "communities" of websites. Instead of simply ranking pages, this technology uses an algorithm that follows links on a webpage to find other pages that link back to the first one and so on from page to page. The algorithm "remembers" where it has been and indexes the number of cross-links and relates these into groupings. In this way virtual communities of webpages are found.

This sounds like an ad. Anyone want to extract the good stuff? -- Stephen Gilbert 17:12 Oct 27, 2002 (UTC)

Done. I NPOVd it. --mav

• This storage costs note is still uses costs specific to web search engines, not all search engines, or at least it explains the cost using the overly-specific words like web, Internet, web page. While just saying search engine without a qualifier may typically refer to a web search engine as pointed out by this article, I don't feel this is a truly generic statement and is not worded so that its facts apply to all search engines. I would recommend trying to paraphrase in such a way as to not mention the web/internet/webpage words. Josh Froelich 21:49, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Why can we have a "list of search engines" but not a list of "open-source search engines" that people keep deleting?
Isn't it just because it's open-source?

We all love open source. Wikipedia has the exactly same sprit of copyleft, freedom of software as open-source. The reason articles like open-source search engines or list of them keep redirected to here is there is no need to have a sparate article about open-source search engines yet. For the sake of readers, we favor to have an article with the moderate length over having too small articles. Also, wikipedia is not a web directory, which means we don't just list websites. Even throwing some extra information to a list of websites still doesn't make it good because we are writing an encyclopedia meaning we basically prefer proses but not lists. Everyone including me is certainly welcome to discuss open-source engines more in this article.

-- Taku 17:14, Mar 17, 2004 (UTC)

I was planning to ad two or three paragraphs about underlying math of search engines and their indexing technologies. Do you think this article is a good place? It will be more like CS stuff. Alternatively there is full text search article, which is definitely too small for the topic. What do you think is a better place? Exceeder 21:50, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Would search engine indexing be a could place for you to expand on this? note its not about retrieval, only indexing Josh Froelich 21:55, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Google has updated the presentation of its content. Can we have a new screen shot in order to reflect an up-to-date example? Constafrequent, infrequently constant 16:41, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Done. I'm curious why that previous rather rediculous screenshot hadn't been removed earlier. Submitted had chosen a query that returned his userpage on Wikipedia as first hit. Maroux 14:29, 2004 May 12 (UTC)

How can you get a search engine? You have to purchase it? it is a software or a hardware??

Shouldn't Hotbot be in the timeline of search engines? --66.229.183.101 15:12, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

The Open Source/Free Software POV is quite visible. The Open/closed-source opposition is not important enough, from a neutral POV, to be presented in the introduction of this article on search engines. It should be presented near the end. Marc Mongenet 02:12, 2005 Feb 13 (UTC)

Done. - Bevo 19:58, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

I have removed the description of Orase. It may well be a useful tool, but it's not a search engine in the usual sense since it doesn't create an index, but spiders in real time. It belongs in some article on search tools, covering Copernic etc. --Macrakis 23:46, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• Actually, while I agree with the removal of commercial references, I just wanted to provide some insight into more of an academic viewpoint on this matter. These real time search engines which do not perform indexing are referred to as agents by some of the geeks. The study of agents is a HUGEEE component of research in artificial intelligence. Search engine agents definitely fall well within the definition of a search engine, more so than you realize. So while I agree with the removal because it is a commercial reference, I do not agree what so ever with your classification of a search engine agent as not a search engine. This type of concept is introduced in first semester college courses in AI. It is well established and unquestionable, I am not making up facts or introducing my own opinion here, just alerting you to this. This again is a notable problem of this article. It is relegated to the popular connotation of search engine, Internet search engines that deal with web pages and do indexing and ranking. When you approach the subject matter from a business standpoint and have been conditioned to understand the concept through the eyes of marketing slang and slop, I fully agree with your statement. But this is just not so. If anything, this article should move its web-related content to a subarticle, and the main article of search engines, in provided a list of one style or classification of search engines, should mention agent-based search, differentiating it from other styles based on the lack of a cache/repository/storage/index, and that the very retrieval algorithm is different. The agent treats the web itself as the index, if you understand my drift, but this is turning into me repeating the first words of a text book now so I am gonna shut myself up. Josh Froelich 22:03, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

I think the following should be changed:

• Drop several minor players, especially drop any meta-search engines (like mamma) or mere "portals". They aren't real search engines (plus there's thousands of them).
  • How do you define what search engine is notable or not notable? Can you make some type of explicit, academically founded statement about which to exclude? Some threshold of media popularity, size of index, date introduced, peak number of users at year X or in some given time period or as of right now? Or is it just how well some marketing company did in promoting their own service? Did the engine introduce a key technologies of some sort? I just point this out because anything short of making a well known rule of what to list or not to list is firmly grounded in subjective, of the current time, thinking, and not encyclopedic, it seems. Josh Froelich 22:11, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
• Talk about MSN Search more under the end of "History" (or after "Google" section).

I haven't done this myself, since I don't remember the relevant dates for things (like when the beta rolled out). It's a little hard/confusing getting the dates straight, since most people (even reporters) don't distinguish between the "MSN Search portal", and the actual Microsoft-powered search engine (with msnbot crawler). Unless a company produced a new search engine, with it's own algorithm and crawler, it proably shouldn't be on this page. If it's worthy of being on this page, it's definately worthy of having it's own article. --rob 11:29, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

• You might also want to make sure you note whether the company name you claim is the one that produced the technology. There is a big difference to me between the company under which the service becomes known, and the small little company that got bought out by the big name company that originally developed the technology. And this is freaking hard to do with search engines, since every 5 minutes this one is using that ones technology, either directly with a notice, without a notice, via meta without permission or with via a key, etc. Good luck finding a primary source, so far I have failed. Take for example, Ask and Teoma. AllTheWeb, Lycos, Yahoo, everyone is using everyone's technology and it is hard to tell who is who. It makes it really difficult to properly attribute. I mean, should you say, for example: The history of Teoma, which was bought out by Ask.com, did XX and so forth. So far I fail to see the logical rule behind what to include or exclude. Josh Froelich 22:11, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

The paragraph about Ask.com seems a little like an advertisement. Should it be pruned? Jennifer Brooks 00:16, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

I would like to propose adding an external link to the www.webmasterbrain.com/seo-tools/seo-experiments/the-search-engine-experiment/ The Search Engine Experiment . Opinions?

I think it's far too simplistic to be worth linking to. --Macrakis 22:29, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

I wonder if there would be value to discussing search engine bias either on this page or in its own separate entry.

The Blorby-paragraph seems like advertising to me. Isn't it to be deleted? Unsigned comment by 83.129.55.233 09:54, 7 January 2006

I'm inclined to agree. I've removed it; someone can put it back if there's any NPOV to be salvaged. /blahedo (t) 01:07, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

How about adding external links to major conferences with a Search Engine focus and to trade publications such as http://searchenginewatch.com?

At the very least Lucene should be mentioned, if for no other reason that Wikipedia uses it...

I totally agreed on that point. Lucene must be at least linked from this article as one of the first really functionnal open source search engine. It has allows great steps in search engine area by providing a plateform for numerous expermiental search engine. In my point of vue a special paragraph should be included there and an entry in the history.

Are there any case sensitive search engines left? Seems to me that Google, Yahoo etc are all case insensitive when performing searches, ie. search for "ozzmosis" will match "Ozzmosis". Once upon a time AltaVista was case sensitive, but seemingly no longer... --ozzmosis 04:32, 29 March 2006 (UTC) world cup

• It would be more appropriate to acknowledge that many engines do not search case-sensitively by default, but provide directions on how to do such searches buried in the documentation. It is off by default because of assumptions that users like the search results better, and that it is not significant enough to most users of online search engine services in improving the recall and precision. Josh Froelich 22:15, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Could someone tell me what 10B and 10TB stand for? I really would like to know because I find this whole article interesting.

• billions and terabytes. You bring up a good point that the units of measurement should probably be links to help answer this question yourself Josh Froelich 22:16, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Actually I dont like the use of B for billion because it can also means Byte. And, although I am not sure, it doesnt seem to be grammatically correct either. You dont see science books telling that the universe is, for example, 12B years old, but 12 billion. Wikipedia is not a newspaper so space is not a problem, so I am going to make this small change myself.

I believe that there is a recent search engine called "Schmoogle" its name being based, in part, upon Google, but this article does not mention it. Should it be added to the list of search engines? ACEO 20:26, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

My understanding is that Schmoogle is simply someone using Google's API to search deep into Google's results and deliver them in some kind of randomized order. Not notable for here, since its just a hack. --MichaelZimmer (talk) 21:10, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

13-September-2006: I have made global edits to revert some web-words to common spellings: the capitalized term "Web site" has been reverted back to "website" and the capitalized term "Web page" has been reverted to "webpage" (16 times), in the sense of a page viewed on a browser, even inside a company's internal Intranet systems not on the World Wide Web. Although some might use the capitalized term "Web page" as a general term (beyond the Web), the term "webpage" can be used to describe browser pages seen on internal Intranet webpage systems, which are not on the "Web" (World Wide Web). Searching in Yahoo! Search matches the word "webpage" to millions of webpages, just as the word "email" is used in webpages 10 times more than the formal hyphenated spelling "e-mail" etc. It seems to be typical, in a technological field, that the important "definition of terms" is not usually done up-front, so the world is left to haggle terminology (such as "website") years later. Anyway, I recommend keeping the spellings "website" and "webpage" in the article. -Wikid77 16:01, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Donald Knuth's views on "email" support you. Jason Godesky 16:13, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

07-October-2006: Someone had added a section of "Search Engine Charts" which were out-dated (including old "Ask Jeeves" and old "MSN Search" using "Yahoo!") and contained many advertising links: that section was removed as unencyclopedic:

Search Engine Charts

*Bruce Clay, INC's Search Engine Relationship Chart ®

*ihelpyou, INC's Search Engine Partnership Chart

*Yahoo! vs. Google Results diagram

The charts were very limited, not dated, and appeared to be obsolete years ago. -Wikid77 14:17, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

I would like to recommend the addition of the following article:

• The Corruption of Electronic Information

It provides an accurate synopsis of the social impact of search engines on online information and how Google is shaping the value of information. It also outlines the importance of search engines in this day and age. I added it but removed it in case it was not appropriate. If it is not appropriate here, any additional suggestions about its placement would be appreciated.

It does not seem to come from a known reliable source, & there is probably material on this topic that does. But it doesn't seem absurd. Perhaps we should soon think about an article on "search engines & society" or something of the sort, which could appropriately link to many essays. DGG 05:57, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm startled I did not notice it before. This article is not about search engines. It is about web search engines only, except for the introduction and a few lines later on. Two choices:

1. leave the page title--since so many other pages link to it., and rewrite the beginning & the headings of the article to make this clear
2. change/move this page to web sarch engines, and do a new more general one. I do not myself know enough to do a more general one, dso it would be a stub.

Advice is solicited. DGG 03:47, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

When I said this about List of search engines the response was basically do nothing. No one has responded to my request for advice since January (on its talk page anyway). I think the that "best" solution would be number two. The article itself mentions other types of search engines completely unrelated to "networked" searches. --Benn Newman 00:02, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Agree. I think its acceptable to do nothing.I've been watching for uses of "search engine" in current tech magazines, etc., and it seems to be used in an extremely vague sense. The qy I still have, is what to do about the confusion between databases and search engines. Some cases are clear. At Chemical Abstracts, the file CA with the bibliographic data and the file Registry with the structural info are databases, & Scifinder is the search engine. At NIH, Entrez is the search engine, Medline the database, and PubMed the interface. Entrex, tho, could also be said to be a database aggregator, as, in another sense, is the National Center for Bioedical Information.

I intend to do some more work with this, and the best heading I can come up with for subject pages or sections is "Biological Databases and Search engines.", for example. I want to get a consistent term before I start in.

Once upon a time, they were called "Indexing and Abstracting Services", abbreviated "I&A" -- that also covered a lot of things. :)DGG 05:06, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Agree pretty much you have only considered web search engines in your article, which is truly a subcategory of what is a search engine. I was thinking along the lines of some type of hierarchy or classification scheme that would be a parent article to all these. While I admit this is great article, you should move it, and then work with everyone on a new article that approaches with topic by treating the web context as only one angle, and provide a link to this article as the authority on web search engines. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jfroelich (talk • contribs) 19:28, 7 December 2006 (UTC).

The phrase "logical reasoning" and similar phrases in the "Notes" section are rather wooden. Someone needs to take a hack at fixing them (I can't think of a phrasing that is much better) --Whiteknox 20:11, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

SqueakBox replaced the picture of Google's home page with a picture of Webcrawler, suggesting POV problems with Google. I'm curious to see if anybody else thinks that Webcrawler is a better choice or if anybody thinks that the article is biased towards Google's POV. --Whiteknox 14:13, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

There is certainly no reason not to have web crawler as the first pic rather than Google. The problem with what was is it means wikipedia is making the statement that equates Google with search engine, which is highly pov given the competitive nature of internet search right now. A different new pic might be good, though Aliweb was the first and we dont have a pic of that, webcrawler was the second and so its not inappropriate, SqueakBox 16:19, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

That doesn't make any sense. Google IS a search engine, last time I checked, and having their picture first is hardly claiming that they "are" search. More to the point, even if the top picture does equate with search engine, then wouldn't it be more POV to put some arbitrary other search engine up there?

Whatever is the first picture will get a bit of a boost. That's the way it goes; there's no way around it, but it's better than having no picture. SnowFire 05:25, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

I entered this dialogue since it looked wiered to me that google image is presented. Better present the image of the first search engine (like web crawler or hotbot) that to boost google more - if it's so popular - what does the image contribute?? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Raphael strauss (talk • contribs) 03:06, 10 April 2007 (UTC).

Is it possible that a search engine could be a bad thing to use? Schools are strating to block them.

Which school would want to block search engines? Gulliveig 04:27, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

No! never . it brings more and more elobarate world wide informations. somebody using wrong ways,it is particular people's mistake. but most of the peoples are very useful by these search engines.

This is not notable nor a NPOV, reeks of commercial slang. Should be removed Josh Froelich 22:40, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

This article lacks real references. I just wanted to point that out and suggest that each statement in this article should be reviewed and that someone should spend time finding some authoritative primary sources to reference. I don't have time, so in bits I might take a hack at it. Should use the REF and REFERENCES tags in wikisyntax too. The following is just to get this section of the talk page started. Josh Froelich 22:35, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

If you read this history article, you will notice that the famous Tim Burners Lee mentions that hypertext (coined by Ted Nelson) itself was a search interface originally. It also points out the origin of search engines from the prior concept document retrieval. When you place the section 'History' in an authoritative resource on search engines, you might want to consider this, that 'search engine' is a marketing/slang term within itself. I mean, in simpler terms, the invention of the web and the history of the internet itself was really a big, giant attempt at making what we now know and refer to as a 'search engine' Josh Froelich 23:08, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

I mean, you are talking about 1990, what about 70AD?

• Wandex Reference: ??
• Google History: ??
• Yahoo History: ??

There was a mention about charity search engines like www.goodsearch.com in the article. It has now been removed. Can somebody explain why that mention about www.goodsearch.com in the article has been removed? If there is no valid reason, please add that back to the text. Maybe we can even create a section about sites of similar genre which includes www.charitycafe.com etc.

This particular type of search engine is not really linked to a search engine category. It's more like an action around search engine or something like a particular use of them. Perhaps we can think to a dedicated section related to specific involvements of search engine in politics or associative actions.G.Dupont 13:59, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

At least when considering hits per day, wouldn't Yahoo! be #1? Unless the article meant in "fanboy" status. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jorophose (talk • contribs) 23:21, 27 February 2007 (UTC).

No, see DLX 01:36, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

The remark at the end of the first paragraph: "Google is mainly used for porn." does not seem appropriate for an enclyclopedia article, nor is it likely to be a true statement regarding Google, given Google's wide use during day be business professionals and by families in the evenings. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 204.76.240.247 (talk) 20:39, 7 March 2007 (UTC).

Totally agree about that comment. Is there any argument to validate the assumptions ? If they think about most searched terms, just take a look to the other search engine (who have almost the same top-words).G.Dupont 14:01, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

I use Google as my main search engine when researching for medical subjects and papers. I don't use it to look for porn. Not that there's anything wrong with that. S. Mass —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.28.1.114 (talk) 04:53, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Much more has to be said about Baidu in its history (same for Baidu dedicated article). The most important thing is that there is more reasons why the Chinese market has only began near 2000 and that certainly not limited to the "media control policy of Chinese government". Then more information should be provided simply on its large use in China (the most used search engine in China for the most speaked language in the world). I wanted to do so but cannot edit this article yet (to young account in en-wikipedia).G.Dupont 14:11, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

chinese censorship is real..just search for it. u will find a bunch of articles. http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8FBCF686&show_article=1 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4088702.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4647398.stm http://www.cfr.org/publication/11515/media_censorship_in_china.html etc..

Google in china was a fiasco,not because the censorship which all the search enigine should be respected.The google in chinese search the result in character not in word,so its analogy in english search is that search in letter not in word.(for those who didn't understand chinese,generally speaking chinese word needs at least two different characters to make senese)That's why google suffered a failure.The reason why baidu success it's that it understood the difference between chinese language and alphabeta systems.Don't even to blame all for the chinese policy.There are many american Hightechs successed in China,but google seemed too confident for himself to not consider the differentiated market.--Ksyrie 07:53, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Somebody, possibly from baidu itself, has vandalised the section to make it an advertisement of their search engine. Please do something about it.

This article should be linked to [searching] or better will be to add an article to the searching task in search engine which is more about computing a similarity between user's need (expressed in a query) and the sources indexed by the engine (called documents corpus and which can simply be the Web). G.Dupont 14:42, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

chinese censorship is real..just google. u will find a bunch of them. http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8FBCF686&show_article=1 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4088702.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4647398.stm http://www.cfr.org/publication/11515/media_censorship_in_china.html

Do we really require this here? I marked the section as {{OR}}. So one please suggest. Mugunth 11:54, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

I think there is too much focus on this article on Google. It should really be more neutral. Joe 16:06, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

After my site has been visited by a search engine named Megaglobe I was attempting to find some more info in here. There was a press release , but their homepage doesn't really tell much so far. Anyone knows enough about to write an article? Gulliveig 08:03, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

The article about picsearch seems to be clear marketing to me. shouldn't it be removed? 86.80.176.20 08:29, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Second that. I removed it. --Whiteknox 23:01, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

I Would like to add a chapter to the contents of this article about "vertical search engines". Attached is the text I propose for this chapter:

Vertical search engines

Vertical search engines or specialized search engines are search engines which specialize in specific content categories or that search within a specific media. Popular Search engines, like Google or Yahoo!, are very effective when the use searches for web sites, web pages or general information. Vertical search engines enable the user to find specific types of listings thus making the search more customized to the user's needs.

Category focus vertical search engines:

This type of search engine, search's for sites, pages and other online content which is relevant to a specific area or category. This group of vertical search engines includes shopping search engines (like Froogle or NexTag ), Government search engines (like "Google US government search" and searchgov.com ), Legal search engines (like law.com and lawcrawler ), travel search engines (like Travelocity and Expedia ), financial search engines (like Business.com and Hoovers ) and others.

Media focused search engines:

This type of search engine focuses on searching within specific online media. This group includes amongst others: 1. Forum and discussion group search engines which scan Discussion boards, forums, groups, answer pages and other "many to many" online media. Search engines of this kind are Omgili and board-tracker . 2. News group search engines which scan news groups worldwide. The most dominant member of this group is Google groups. 3. Blog Search engines focus on the blog sphere. Some of the members of this group are: Google Blog Search , Technorati and Blog-search-engine . 4. Mailing list search engines like "list of lists" or E-Zine List 5. Chat Search engines like Chatsearch and Search IRC . —The preceding --Yoav Pridor 14:33, 18 April 2007 (UTC) comment was added by Ypridor (talk • contribs) 05:43, 18 April 2007 (UTC).

Okay. Thanks for adding the content. I worked on stylization; if I made a content change that is incorrect then I'll be glad to fix it. The main thing now is that links that take the user outside of wikipedia (e.g. [www.searchgov.com]) should be put at the end of the article under "External Links". --Whiteknox 16:53, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

okay. If I put them on th bottom how will readers know they are links? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ypridor (talk • contribs) 15:25, 25 April 2007 (UTC).

I checked in the Manual of Style and it says you're right. In a case like this, embedded links are appropriate. --Whiteknox 20:21, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

It would be nifty to have a chart here showing the market share of the major search engines over time. -- Beland 14:54, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Yahoo being the current no 1 search engine, the 1st picture with this artile, of a screenshot of Google, labeling it as the no. 1 search engine needs to be replaced. The present Alexa ranking if Google is 3.--Pinaki ghosh 00:27, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Yahoo is the number 1 site in traffic. But Yahoo is a portal with many functions, including news, email, etc. Every serious statistic I've seen agrees that Google is the most-used search engine, by pretty much every measure you can think of: number of searches, number of users, number of pageviews.... And that's without even counting the searches done by Google for other sites, e.g. AOL. --Macrakis 19:29, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Why not have a section talking about how many times yahoo, google, etc employees take a dump and flush the toilet too? All that wasted water... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.97.20.102 (talk) 19:12, 3 May 2007 (UTC).

Just a pretext for Picsearch to add their marketing link ! We should remove the entire section !! (unsigned comment by User:84.139.212.171 2007-05-11T18:43:49)

Agreed. I have removed the section. Any server farm, whether search or portal or email or corporate data center, consumes a lot of electricity. --Macrakis 18:59, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Image:Google.com front page.png is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in Wikipedia articles constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.BetacommandBot 16:19, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Do you think the date founded should be kept in the table in this article? It's making it look very cluttered and I'm not sure how important it is here... especially since it's not consistent across all entries. I think it might be a better idea to develop a more detailed table on the list of search engines page. Let me know what you think? I'm willing to do that.

Removed this section. Both the examples are not describing original search engines. These cannot be valid examples of search engines. Ganesh J. Acharya 10:05, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

The history section are showing 1.1 Google.com, 1.2 Yahoo etc. It does not seem to be appropriate. They need to highlight the history of search engines more. Ganesh J. Acharya 10:14, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

http://www.powerset.com/ is currently running a closed beta of their 'natural language search engine'. Do you think it should be added to the list? The only public release for it has been some blurry screen shots on TechCrunch. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Searchmaven (talk • contribs). 3 July, 2007

@Searchmaven: This website seems to be defunct now. Jarble (talk) 18:02, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

09-November-2007: I have restored the article "search engine" to the November-2007 overview form (as minimal content), adding the following top hatnote to lessen shock for others who might expect the prior full content (from 2 months ago):

This is a generic overview only. For Web searches, see: Web search engine,

or for a particular search engine, see: List of search engines.

The prior information, from before September 2007, is mostly contained in the other article "Web search engine". By keeping the overview article short, it can be easier to expand details in the various spinoff articles. Also, the topic phrase "search engine" was a major target for vandalism, so keeping the article as a short overview reduces text for embedding vandalism, typically hidden by multiple consecutive edits of a large page. Other articles have been sheltered from vandalism, by the similar tactic, of moving them to altered names, slightly reworded from being exactly a targeted topic phrase, such as avoiding "theory of evolution" or "Nazi", etc. -Wikid77 20:39, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

I see no problem with your change. The problem of lack of sources still remains, even in the shortened article. EdJohnston 00:53, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Good point, I will try and add in some sources eventually. I have hundreds, so I will try and filter that down to some of the best ones that fit wiki standards. Josh Froelich 19:03, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

• 1) I removed this:
• “The Vertical Search Survey 2008,” E-consultancy, December 2007

it looks like spamlink, requires registration at Convera website to get a report sponsored by the company.

• 2) I added a need for a citation on the opening paragraph. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (5th Ed) gives 'search engine' as "Computing: A program which searches for and identifies specified items in a database or network, esp. the Internet". The loose definition here of an 'interface' instead of a 'program' covers anything that might incorporate a search engine, and has resulted in the List of search engines page looking like a Yellow Pages for the Web. Ray3055 (talk) 12:12, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

The link to the only citation is dead. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.142.158.137 (talk) 02:17, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

...Search Engine with pictures from which go to "video games", to "App." and all "virtual-pictures"? There are Search engine to show books, music and film, WIKIPEDIA, etc... but not "Virtual Search Engine" like "Windows 10" "explicitly" in Internet-form, with all-pictures (by categories) "full-video-display"... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.38.65.148 (talk) 13:43, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

This question is somewhat vague: are you referring to desktop search engines, or something else? Jarble (talk) 18:01, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

this article current state is super bad. it only references one source. It need at least some 10 to establish notability. besides the types of search engine should be discussed in prose, as to make clear in a encyclopedic way that there are search engines other than web search engines.Hfnreiwjfd (talk) 22:13, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

same topic fgnievinski (talk) 18:05, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

yep, and Search engine. All three can be merged. Caelum123 (talk) 05:11, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

I support merging all three of them. Euro know (talk) 07:15, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

For the original proposal,   Y Merge completed.

My view is that merge into the main article would need a specific proposal, tagged on the Search engine page. Klbrain (talk) 09:57, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

New proposal: Talk:Search_engine#Proposed_merge_of_Search_engine_(computing)_into_Search_engine. fgnievinski (talk) 06:52, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Firstly, the term "knowledge panel" only appears in the caption, without explanation.

Nevertheless, given concerns about Google's dominance, I think this general article shouldn't include the image.It would be fine if the topic were just "google search engine", but it isn't. I've noted previous comments about the neutrality of google images. Since a link to Google Knowledge Graph is sufficient, I propose to delete the image. Humpster (talk) 05:42, 2 January 2025 (UTC)