Internet and Arabic Search engines.

number: 
742
English
department: 
Degree: 
Imprint: 
Computer Science
Author: 
Saba Abdul Khaliq Abdullah Al-Khadady
Supervisor: 
Dr.Saad A. Mehdi
Dr.Taha S. Bashaga
year: 
2002
Abstract:

The Internet is a global network of computers, which has been developed and evolved since its initial conception in late 1960's. The World Wide Web becomes the most popular way to access and use the Internet. The reason is simple, the web allows full, high-quality color graphics and sound that make it an attractive multimedia tool. It is the resources and the ease of use of the web that made accessing and using the Internet popular with millions of computer users. It is made up of documents created with a special language called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The Internet has now become a vast collection of more than 90 million interconnected computers with an estimated 400 million users world-wide, growing at a rate of over 100,000 people every day. It is also estimated that there are 5 billion web pages currently available online. Therefore, search and indexing tools are crucial for locating specific resources and organizing information. Arabic language is being increasingly used on the Internet. Searching and indexing of Arabic text are different from other languages such as English. 1. Arabic is a derivational language where words are derived from a root. 2. Arabic has large number of combined word expressions. To search for an expression, one needs to use logical operator such as "and" or "near" to find the expression. 3. Further, current usage of Arabic includes many foreign words that are written in Arabic letters. These foreign words can be written in different ways, which leads to difficulties in retrieving them. In this work, a comparison study was made between famous, widely used foreign search engines as well as few available Arabic search engines. In this comparison study, the properties and the differences of each search engine were studied. Finally results and conclusions were discussed.