Computer Literacy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Computer Literacy - Essay Example These audiences are identified and the reasons as to why a certain search engine is suitable for them. The effectiveness of all the search engines for their different purposes is also discussed. Finally, each of the search engines has some advantages and disadvantages over the others due to their different aesthetic, technical and privacy features. These advantages and disadvantages are discussed for each of the search engines. Search engines can be classified into several types. General search engines are portals which allow for searching of content using an algorithm specifically designed for this task. Google is a general search engine, alongside Yahoo! and Bing among others. Metasearch engines work by submitting query keywords to other search engines, which in turn perform a search using the provided keywords. The results are then aggregated and returned to the user. A point to note is that metasearch engines do not have a database of webpage contents, they only sort the search results from other search engines in a desirable manner (Lib.berkeley.edu, 2015). Examples of metasearch engines includes Dogpile, Excite, DeeperWeb, Kayak, Answers.com, Clusty and LeapFish. DuckDuckGo takes a hybrid approach, being both a general search engine that uses its own crawler while still utilizing a metasearch functionality. Multimedia search engines are used to search the web for videos, images, music, movies and ima ges and multimedia-related services. Search engines can also be classified as crawler-based and human-powered. Crawler-based search engines use software bots to search through websites and create an index by analyzing and categorizing them based on their content, the websites that link to them, the websites they link to and the level of traffic that they experience. Human-powered search engines employ human editors to create and edit their indexes (Yuanlei.com, 2015). DuckDuckGo and Dogpile search engines fall in the crawler-powered category.