Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
wide-scale issues. An auxiliary Web server located in a distant geographic
location that says only “We are down due to <problem X> and expect to
return to operation shortly. Please check back in a few hours for updates”
can decrease client loss to competitor services. Such sites can also play
a critical role in disaster recovery by allowing communication between
displaced elements of the business during recovery efforts. I will discuss
these and other disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) opportu-
nities in greater detail later in this topic.
The Needle in the Haystack
The sheer volume of information present on the World Wide Web (ver-
sions 1.0 through 3.0) is simply staggering. This content reflects advertis-
ing claims intended to sway customers toward a product or away from
competitors. It reflects personal opinion, political agenda, or may be
entirely fabricated to suit no obvious purpose at all. Finding useful infor-
mation in this vast sea of data requires automated tools to find, identify,
categorize, and return references to information that may be useful to the
searcher. Even simple search queries can return hundreds of thousands of
individual sites that might or might not contain the desired information.
This is searching for the needle in thousands of haystacks, many of which
are not even written in the same language and some of which have been
crafted to be deliberately misleading.
From the early Gopherspace search engines predating the World Wide
Web, search engines have become increasingly robust and focused in the
materials they return. Search engines such as Google and Bing attempt
to regularly index large portions of the Internet, identifying key terms
and presenting subsets of this data to users based on terms provided by
the user. A good query might return a few hundred references, which can
then be reviewed by the client for relevant details. A bad query might
return tens of thousands of potential sites, references to sites no longer in
existence, or unrelated sites that have malformed search tags.
Ranking
Most search engines display returned results based on an internal ranking
system, attempting to provide the most useful, most common, or most rele-
vant results first. Some search engines include paid “content promotion”
