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6. Searching text images and videos Advanced

searching (phrases)

Text Searching

Text searching is the most common form of searching today. All of the search engines
available on the web have been primarily designed for searching text and retrieval is based on
when the text found matches or closely matches the user’s query. The most common user
criticism of text searching is getting the "extra links" that are totally irrelevant to the desired
information. "Users of the Web mostly employ search engines to find the information they
are looking for, but usually far too many Web addresses are returned in response to their
queries. Even worse, many of the pages corresponding to these addresses are totally
irrelevant to them. Technically speaking, the precision (in this context the proportion of
returned addresses that are relevant) is usually very low." (Kaindl, 217) One of the reasons
why the additional links appear is that most search engines today are not sophisticated
enough to deal with the ambiguity of the English language. The search engines are simply
trying to match the "symbols" entered as part of a user’s query to the "symbols" on the web
pages. This is why when the user tries to search for information on the Magic Johnson the
basketball player; they may also get links for information on Johnson & Johnson the

corporation. Since the search engine is matching symbols, the links for Johnson & Johnson
are a match based on the user’s criteria. Another big issues or problem regarding searching is
that more often than not, the average user does not really have a specific concrete idea of
what they are looking for.

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