Disadvantages of search engines

Disadvantages of search engines

Introduction

Search engines

       Most of the people are now using the internet to get information that they require. In their endeavors of trying to locate this information, they will use the search engines or the subject directories. Here, the disadvantages of using the search engine will be examined.

       Search engines are just index of websites which are mainly created by software known as “web crawlers” and the “spiders”. They select the pages to include in the index randomly. Even though search engines are bigger than the web directories, they cover a small proportion of the internet. Generally, they can’t index information that is held in the databases which are held in the web pages.

Disadvantages

1.        The sites that appear through a search engine are only the index of keywords by software and they are hence not evaluated for any relevance. The software only displays these sites even though they are not relevant to your search
2.        One also needs to be very specific during the selection of the key words because there are so many sites on the internet. There are also so many results which can result through one indexing or search and these can prove to be very tiresome to evaluate.
3.        The search outcome displayed may not be arranged in a sequence and hence one may be required to scroll up to the next page to get the relevant information that he/she was searching for.

       To overcome these shortcomings, one may embark on:

       Subject gateways and directories- these are index of directories that are arranged by the topics. The sites that are included in this indexing are manually selected and evaluated according to specific search criteria and hence they may be more effective.

       These directories may also be updated daily with the best contents and criteria.

       Invisible Web- Also known as the “deep web”, they consist of information that cannot be found through other ancient search engines like Google. They contain information that is contained in archived materials, information that had been protected by the firewall security and other databases. Some of these may require subscription for assessment.

       In conclusion, it is always better to use directories which are updated daily and manually by people who may clarify the options so that you can get the best results you need. This is because the search engines are bumped with many information and they display a lot of them hence causing much confusion.

References

Courtland L. Bovee& John V. Thill, July 21, 2013. Business Communication Today (12th Edition.