Abstract:
It is emerging that it is very difficult for the
major search engines to provide a comprehensive
and up-to-date search service of the Web. Even the
largest search engines index only a small
proportion of static Web pages and do not search
the Web's backend databases that are estimated to
be 500 times larger than the static Web. The scale
of such searching introduces both technical and
economic problems. What is more, in many cases
users are not able to retrieve the information they
desire because of the simple and generic search
interface provided by the major search engines.
A necessary response to these search problems
is the creation of specialized search engines. These
search engines search just for information in a
particular topic or category on the Web. Such
search engines will have smaller and more
manageable indexes and have a powerful domainspecific
search interface.
This paper discusses the issues in this area and
gives an overview of the techniques for building
specialized search engines.
