The Internet is hard to index because of these reasons

You are reading this article because you want to figure out how to quickly and efficiently get from 200,000 results to the six things you need. People often approach searching the way they play slot machines at a casino. You just throw in a few keywords, pull the lever, and wait for your prize. Your odds are about as good. Effective searching requires a blend of learned skills, common sense and a bit of clever intuition.

In order to understand how the search tools work and why sometimes they do not, you need to understand a little history about the Internet. Most people interchangeably use the words "Internet" and "Web." But they are really different things.

The Internet - or The 'Net - is a series of rules that allows computers of all types to connect and then communicate with other computers. The World Wide Web - The Web - is a software protocol that runs on top of the Internet, allowing users to easily access files stored on Internet computers. In the pre-Web days of the early 1990s, you had to use incredibly long complicated addresses to find specific information on the Internet. The Web changed that, making it easy to retrieve all kinds of different files from pictures, sound, and video, and text by simply clicking on a hypertext link.

One tool that transformed the Web into an easy-to-use system was the development of hyperlinks - a system all but taken for granted now. A hypertext link allows computerized objects like images and sounds to be linked together at a specific place tied to the text. When you click the hypertext link, it opens the file associated with the object.

In the 1980s, with the help of the U.S. Department of Defense, a network of computers emerged. When the network adopted a universal standard of communication called TCP/IP, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, the Internet became widely available. This new network was used mostly by governments and universities. It was not until 1990 when Tim Berners-Lee developed several key components of the Web, including hypertext markup language (HTML), that the Web really took off.

Early internet search tools were very raw. There were two methods for retrieving information. First, you needed to establish a connection to the remote computer where the file you wanted was located. This was called Telnet, a terminal emulation program. Then you needed to transfer the file you wanted back to your computer. To do that you needed an FTP client, or a File Transfer Protocol, which standardized the way files were sent and received.

For a long time, to get what you wanted, you had to know both the address of the location you were looking for and the specific file name you wanted to find once you got there. While the 'Net took evolutionary turns, commercial online services like Dialog and LexisNexis offered advanced search and information retrieval networks on closed or proprietary systems, where sophisticated research could be done.

It was Berners-Lee, then working at CERN, a world-famous, high-energy physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland who - through a series of important innovations - created what would become the World Wide Web that we now use. Among other things, he created a way for all computers to use a common language that display identically on any computer. He also created a set of rules for computers to use to communicate with one another and to allow documents to be retrieved without worrying about where the computer was located.

Berners-Lee also created what is now called URL, the Uniform Resource Locator system, which gave unique addresses and then pulled it all together into an early version of what is now the Web. Interestingly, the first web directory is still online and can be viewed at W3.org. Be aware that most of the links listed there no longer work!

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The Internet is hard to index because of these reasons

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