Methods of Indexing

Methods of Indexing

There are two important methods of indexing used in web database creation - full-text
and human.

Full-Text Indexing

As its name implies, full-text indexing is where every word on the page is put into a database for searching. Alta Vista, Google, Infoseek, Excite are examples of full-text databases. Full-text indexing will help you find every example of a reference to a specific name or terminology. A general topic search will not be very useful in this database, and one has to dig through a lot of "false drops" (or returned pages that have nothing to do with the search). In this case the websites are indexed my computer software. This software called “spiders” or “robots” automatically seeks out Web sites on the Internet
and retrieves information from those sites (which matches the search criteria) using set instructions written into the software. This information is then automatically entered into a database.

Key word Indexing

In key word indexing only “important” words or phrases are put into the database. Lycos is a good example of key word indexing.

Human Indexing

Yahoo and some of Magellan are two of the few examples of human indexing. In the Key word indexing, all of the work was done by a computer program called a "spider" or a "robot". In human indexing, a person examines the page and determines a very few key phrases that describe it. This allows the user to find a good start of works on a topic - assuming that the topic was picked by the human as something that describes the page. This is how the directory-based web databases are developed.