Hi, I had a final exam last week and I just want to make sure whether I have got the multiple questions right. I would be great if you can share your thought (or an answer) about these two questions.

  1. A search engine works from a collection of Web pages that it gets from

a. lists of data pushed by Web servers
b. data pulled from a list provided by each Web server
c. pulling data from the Web, by following links from page to page
d. analysing all of the words on every page

I said it is d but I had a choice between c and d but I am not sure which one is correct.

  1. A modern Web search engine fills a search request to returns an list of matching pages in priority order, by using
    (Select one or more)

a. all of the words on the pages
b. the links between pages
c. the metadata in the page heading
d. the URL of the pages
e. the context of the request

I said a, b , c, e but not too sure again..

Thank you!

1) search engines, such as Google have processes that crawl the web, known as web crawlers or web spiders. The access a web page and index the content and follow the links within the content. As they discover new pages, the indexing and link following continues.

2) Looks like All of the above to me. Although most search engines to not factor in metadata as before.

These are a bit tricky. I would actually guess C for question one, because I know that google uses bots that save every link they hit (that passes their spam filters) for future crawling. So that makes the most sense to me. Saying they get webpages by analyzing all the words on every page sound more like how they index pages and assign keywords.

As for the second question, I think that the URL of the pages do matter in the search. So I would probably say all of the answers, although c is debatable because I don't think google uses metadata in the page ranking algorithm anymore (although other search engines probably do so it's still probably a correct answer).

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