Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 129-139).

After completing this tutorial you will be able to access "Google", conduct a simple search, and interpret the search results.

Thesis (MPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2004. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study investigated Internet search tools / engines to identify desirable features that can be used as a benchmark or standard to evaluate web search engines. In the past, the Internet was thought of as a big spider's web, ultimately connecting all the bits of information. It has now become clear that this is not the case, and that the bow tie analogy is more accurate. This analogy suggests that there is a central core of well-connected pages, with links IN and OUT to other pages, tendrils and orphan pages. This emphasizes the importance of selecting a search tool that is well connected and linked to the central core. Searchers must take into account that not all search tools search the Invisible Web and this will reflect on the search tool selected. Not all information found on the Web and Internet is reliable, current and accurate, and Web information must be evaluated in terms of authority, currency, bias, purpose of the Web site, etc. Different kinds of search tools are available on the Internet, such as search engines, directories, library gateways, portals, intelligent agents, etc. These search tools were studied and explored. A new categorization for online search tools consisting of Intelligent Agents, Search Engines, Directories and Portals / Hubs is suggested. This categorization distinguishes the major differences between the 21 kinds of search tools studied. Search tools / engines consist of spiders, crawlers, robots, indexes and search tool software. These search tools can be further distinguished by their scope, internal or external searches and whether they search Web pages or Web sites. Most search tools operate within a relationship with other search tools, and they often share results, spiders and databases. This relationship is very dynamic. The major international search engines have identifiable search features. The features of Google, Yahoo, Lycos and Excite were studied in detail. Search engines search for information in different ways, and present their results differently. These characteristics are critical to the Recall/Precision ratio. A well-planned search strategy will improve the Precision/Recall ratio and consider the web-user capabilities and needs. Internet search tools/engines is not a panacea for all information needs, and have pros and cons. The Internet search tool evaluation instrument was developed based on desirable features of the major search tools, and is considered a benchmark or standard for Internet search tools. This instrument, applied to three South African search tools, provided insight into the capabilities of the local search tools compared to the benchmark suggested in this study. The study concludes that the local search engines compare favorably with the major ones, but not enough so to use them exclusively. Further research into this aspect is needed. Intelligent agents are likely to become more popular, but the only certainty in the future of Internet search tools is change, change, and change. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie het Internetsoekinstrumente/-enjins ondersoek met die doel om gewenste eienskappe te identifiseer wat as 'n standaard kan dien om soekenjins te evalueer. In die verlede is die Internet gesien as 'n groot spinnerak, wat uiteindelik al die inligtingsdeeltjies verbind. Dit het egter nou duidelik geword dat dit glad nie die geval is nie, en dat die strikdas analogie meer akkuraat is. Hierdie analogie stel voor dat daar 'n sentrale kern van goed gekonnekteerde bladsye is, met skakels IN en UIT na ander bladsye, tentakels en weesbladsye. Dit beklemtoon die belangrikheid om die regte soekinstrument te kies, naamlik een wat goed gekonnekteer is, en geskakel is met die sentrale kern van dokumente. Soekers moet in gedagte hou dat nie alle soekenjins in die Onsigbare Web soek nie, en dit behoort weerspieël te word in die keuse van die soekinstrument. Nie alle inligting wat op die Web en Internet gevind word is betroubaar, op datum en akkuraat nie, en Web-inligting moet geëvalueer word in terme van outoriteit, tydigheid, vooroordeel, doel van die Webruimte, ens. Verskillende soorte soekinstrumente is op die Internet beskikbaar, soos soekenjins, gidse, biblioteekpoorte, portale, intelligente agente, ens. Hierdie soekinstrumente is bestudeer en verken. 'n Nuwe kategorisering vir aanlyn soekinstrumente bestaande uit Intelligente Agente, Soekinstrumente, Gidse en Portale/Middelpunte word voorgestel. Hierdie kategorisering onderskei die hoofverskille tussen die 21 soorte soekinstrumente wat bestudeer is. Soekinstrumente/-enjins bestaan uit spinnekoppe, kruipers, robotte, indekse en soekinstrument sagteware. Hierdie soekinstrumente kan verder onderskei word deur hulle omvang, interne of eksterne soektogte en of hulle op Webbladsye of Webruimtes soek. Die meeste soekinstrumente werk in verhouding met ander soekinstrumente, en hulle deel dikwels resultate, spinnekoppe en databasisse. Hierdie verhouding is baie dinamies. Die hoof internasionale soekenjins het soekeienskappe wat identifiseerbaar is. Die eienskappe van Google, Yahoo en Excite is in besonderhede bestudeer. Soekenjins soek op verskillende maniere na inligting, en lê hulle resultate verskillend voor. Hierdie karaktereienskappe is krities vir die Herwinning/Presisie verhouding. 'n Goedbeplande soekstrategie sal die Herwinning/Presisie verhouding verbeter. Internet soekinstrumente/-enjins is nie die wondermiddel vir alle inligtingsbehoeftes nie, en het voor- en nadele. Die Internet soekinstrument evalueringsmeganisme se ontwikkeling is gebaseer op gewenste eienskappe van die hoof soekinstrumente, en word beskou as 'n standaard vir Internet soekinstrumente. Hierdie instrument, toegepas op drie Suid-Afrikaanse soekenjins, het insae verskaf in die doeltreffendheid van die plaaslike soekinstrumente soos vergelyk met die standaard wat in hierdie studie voorgestel word. In die studie word tot die slotsom gekom dat die plaaslike soekenjins gunstig vergelyk met die hoof soekenjins, maar nie genoegsaam sodat hulle eksklusief gebruik kan word nie. Verdere navorsing oor hierdie aspek is nodig. Intelligente Agente sal waarskynlik meer gewild word, maar die enigste sekerheid vir die toekoms van Internet soekinstrumente is verandering, verandering en nogmaals verandering.

DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree MAGISTER TECHNOLOGIAE in INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY in the FACULTY OF BUSINESS INFORMATICS at the CAPE PENINSULA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY 2006 / Research has shown that most website developers first build a website and only later focus on the ‘searchability’ and ‘visibility’ of the website. Companies spend large amounts of money on the development of a website which sadly cannot be indexed by search engines, is rejected by directory editors and which is furthermore invisible to crawlers. The primary objective of this dissertation is to compare and report on the impact of text-based versus graphic-based hyperlinks on website visibility. The method employed in the research was to develop two e-Commerce based websites with the same functionality, contents and keywords, however utilising different navigation schemes. The one website had all hyperlinks coded in text-phrases, while the other embedded the hyperlinks in graphics. Both websites were submitted to the same search engines at the same time. A period of eight months was allowed to ensure that the websites drew sufficient ‘hits’ to enable a comparative analysis to be conducted. Two industry standard website ranking programs were used to monitor how the two websites feature in the search engine rankings. Graphs as well as text-based reports produced by the ranking programs and the t-test were used to compare and analyse the results. Evidence based on the reviewed literature indicated that there are conflicting reports on the impact of text as opposed to graphic hyperlinks on website visibility. However, there is unsupported evidence that text hyperlinks achieved higher rankings than graphics-based hyperlinks. Although the ‘human website browsers’ find a certain amount of graphical aids conducive to easier navigation, ‘search engine crawlers’ find many of these same graphic aids impossible to index. The study supported that the graphic-based website ranked higher than the text-based website, which calls for a balance to be found between these two extremes. This balance would satisfy both ‘human website browsers’ and ‘search engine crawlers’. It is posited by this author that this dissertation provides website designers with the abilities to achieve such a balance. KEYWORDS: search engines, hyperlinks, text, graphics, visibility, navigation, ecommerce, design.

Thesis (DTech (Informatics))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2017. / Any e-commerce venture using a website as main shop-front should invest in marketing their website. Previous empirical evidence shows that most Search Engine Marketing (SEM) spending (approximately 82%) is allocated to Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns while only 12% was spent on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). The remaining 6% of the total spending was allocated to other SEM strategies. No empirical work was found on how marketing expenses compare when used solely for either the one or the other of the two main types of SEM. In this study, a model will be designed to guide the development of a dual SEM strategy.

No description available.

A dissertation submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Technology: Information Technology, Durban University of Technology, 2011. / This study examines the perceived effect of the following factors on web searching ability of academic staff in the computing discipline: demographic attributes such as gender, age group, position held by the academic staff, highest qualification, etc; lecturing experience, research experience, English language proficiency, and web searching experience. The research objectives are achieved using a Likert-scale based questionnaire for 61 academic staff from Information Technology and Computer Science departments from four Universities from the Kwazulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa. Descriptive and inferential statistics were computed for data analysis from the questionnaire after performing data reliability and validity tests using factor analysis and Cronbach‟s coefficients methods on the PASW Statistics 18.0 (SPSS). Descriptive statistics revealed a majority of staff from IT as compared to staff in CS and, a majority of under qualified middle age male staff in junior positions with considerable years of lecturing experience but with little research experience. Inferential statistics show an association between web searching ability and demographic attributes such as academic qualifications, positions, and years of research experience, and also reveal a relationship between web searching ability and lecturing experience, and between web searching ability and English language ability. However, the association between position, English language ability, and searching ability was found to be the strongest of all. The novelty finding by this study is the effect of lecturing experience on web searching ability which has not been claimed by existing research reviewed. Ideas for future research include mentoring of academic staff by more experienced staff, training of novice web searchers, designing and using semantic search systems both in English and in local languages, publishing more web content in local languages, and triangulating various research strategies for the analysis of the usability of web search engines.

Current Web image search engines, such as Google or Bing Images, adopt a hybrid search approach in which a text-based query (e.g. "apple") is used to retrieve a set of relevant images, which are then refined by the user (e.g. by re-ranking the retrieved images based on similarity to a selected example). This approach makes it possible to use both text information (e.g. the initial query) and image features (e.g. as part of the refinement stage) to identify images which are relevant to the user. One limitation of these current systems is that text and image features are treated as independent components and are often used in a decoupled manner. This work proposes to develop an integrated hybrid search method which leverages the synergies between text and image features. Recently, there has been tremendous progress in the computer vision community in learning models of visual concepts from collections of example images. While impressive performance has been achieved on standardized data sets, scaling these methods so that they are capable of working at web scale remains a significant challenge. This work will develop approaches to visual modeling that can be scaled to address the task of retrieving billions of images on the Web. Specifically, we propose to address two research issues related to integrated text- and image-based retrieval. First, we will explore whether models of visual concepts which are learned from collections of web images can be utilized to improve the image ranking associated with a text-based query. Second, we will investigate the hypothesis that the click-patterns associated with standard web image search engines can be utilized to learn query-specific image similarity measures that support improved query-refinement performance. We will evaluate our research by constructing a prototype integrated hybrid retrieval system based on the data from 300K real-world image queries. We will conduct user-studies to evaluate the effectiveness of our learned similarity measures and quantify the benefit of our method in real world search tasks such as target search.

The developments in technology and concomitant access to the Internet have reshaped the way people research in their personal and academic lives. The ever-expanding amount of information on the Internet is creating an environment where users are able to find what they seek for or add to the body of knowledge or both. Researching, especially for academic purposes, has been greatly impacted by the Internet’s rapid growth and expansion. This project stemmed from a desire to understand how student’s research methods have evolved when taking into account their busy schedules and needs. The availability and accessibility of the Internet has increased its use considerably as a straightforward medium from which users obtain desired information. This thesis was to ascertain in what manner senior undergraduate students at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Pietermaritzburg campus use the Internet for academic research purposes which is largely determined by the individual’s personal preference and access to the Internet. Through the relevant literature review there arose pertinent questions that required answers. Students were interviewed to determine when, why and how they began using the Internet, and how this usage contributes to their academic work; whether it aids or inhibits student’s research. Through collection and analysis of data, evidence emerged that students followed contemporary research methods, making extensive use of the Internet, while a few use both forms of resources, unless compelled by lecturers when following assignment requirements. As a secondary phase, from the results received from the students, lecturers were interviewed. Differing levels of restrictions on students were evident; they themselves use the Internet for academic research purposes. Lecturers were convinced they had the understanding and experience to discern what was relevant and factual. Referring to the Internet for research is becoming more popular. This should continue to increase as the student’s lives become more complex. A suggestion offered by this research project is to academic staff. Equip students from their early University years on standards they should follow in order to research correctly, as opposed to limiting their use of the Internet leading in part to students committing plagiarism being unaware of the wealth of reputable resources available for their use and benefit on the Internet. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Australian Centre for Educational Studies, School of Education, 2009. / "2008". Bibliography: p. 268-283.