Tuning up the search engine

Advances in Internet search engine technology may not help you blast Klingons into outer space, but they should help you find them more quickly on the Web. The whole arena for Internet searching has become rather interesting. Search engines appear poised to make some serious breakthroughs in relevancy ranging and personalization that promise to increase the accuracy and reliability of search. On the ether hand, data suggests that users are becoming increasingly disenchanted with search engines that don't actually search the Web, but rather search records of the Web sites their robots have visited. Some online merchants (Victoria's Secret, for example) don't even enable keyword searches on their sites. The Web's increasingly dynamic nature complicates searching. New pages created on the fly using personalization information, and even static content, with dynamically inserted sidebars, navigation bars, advertising and commentary, can present a rapidly changing picture for any robot to discover. And as indexes grow larger, search system performance becomes a significant problem.