Page 20 - Web Search-En-V3

Introduction to web search

The word web refers to the World Wide Web, a portion of the Internet consisting of the
pages that can be accessed by a Web browser. Many people assume that the Web is the same
as the Internet, thus they use these terms interchangeably. However, the term Internet refers to
the global network made of servers that allow the information sharing over the Web.
Therefore, even though a large amount of the Internet is made up of the Web, they are not the
same thing.

A web page is often used to deliver information to users, including text, pictures, or
videos Multiple web pages make up a website, like the Supreme Council website. The number
of web pages reached 1,167,715,133 in January 2022 (according to Netcraft’s January 2023
Web Server Survey compared). This massive number of pages contains much information that
needs effective search techniques to reach the desired results. Thus, web search engines were
invented to help users in searching the internet.

Web search tools

Have you ever been through a 1000 pages book just to look for a certain piece of information?
You do not have to read the whole book. Instead, you jump to the book index to find the
specific chapter related to that information. Similarly, this is how search engines work. The
search engine is a program that searches for specific items in a database that corresponds to a
certain query provided by the user. For example, YouTube has a search engine that searches
its video library whenever you enter a certain query in the search bar.
When the database that the search engine uses is the content of the web pages found on the
Internet, we refer to it with the web search engine.

Figure 1: Top ranked Web browser.

13 Training unit in the field of technological information - at the Supreme Council of Universities © Intellectual property rights 2024