Search Engines: The Propellers of Information Diffusion

Gone are the days when one used to grope in the dark for a relevant piece of information. In the present day world, one is inundated with information, courtesy the World Wide Web. This surfeit of information brings in its wake, a different challenge; that of information overload. The search engines, led by Google, enable surfers to dig into this enormous set of information and fish out the requisite data. To that extent these search engines are a sine qua non and the flag bearers of information dissemination. The present paper is a modest attempt to understand the functioning of these search engines. The paper, by enlisting the various search engines and their purpose, tries to highlight the range of options available to surfers. Finally the paper attempts to envisage as to what the future would look like in the terrain of Internet search.