How to Create a Search Engine
According to a study by Stanford University, tens of millions of queries are processed every day through a search engine. A search engine helps people find information online by crawling through the Internet and picking out relevant Web pages. Knowing how to create your own search engine will help make your research more effective for work, school and even emergencies.
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Instructions
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Pick the Web service you would like to create your search engine with. The easiest and most highly customizable is Google Custom Search. According to Nielson NetRatings, Google is the most popular search engine and twice as popular as its biggest competitor, Yahoo! You can also use Gigablast if you would like an engine that searches only the pages on your personal website.
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Go to the custom search engine website and become acquainted with your options. For Google Custom Search, you have the option of searching from any group of websites, and are not limited to how many sites you can include in your query.
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Search based on site endings. In Google Custom Search, these are input in "Sites to search." Type *.edu to find sites from schools and universities if you're looking for scholarly research. Include *.org if you want research from organizations, especially nonprofit ones, but keep in mind that anyone can create this kind of website. Type *.gov for government websites, which are highly reliable sources of information. Use country endings like *.ca or *.il for websites from specific countries, including businesses, organizations and individuals.
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Put an asterisk (*) before or after a group of websites you would like to search. For example, if you would like to search for any site on eHow.com, type www.ehow.com/*. You can also search domains by putting an asterisk before the website like *.mydomain.com. Put asterisks on both sides of words to only search through parts of sites with those words. For example:
www.mydomain.com/*internet* will only give you pages from mydomain.com that have the word "internet" in their name.
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Click "Next" after you've completed the list of websites you want to search and input your query. Save your list of websites for future use by clicking "Finish."
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit search and magnifier buttons. (with clipping path) image by Andrey Zyk from Fotolia.com
