Abstract

Search is the #2 activity on the Internet, after email. Search has become central to everyone's lives to help people discover products, services, information, and entertainment on the Web. There are 4 major general purpose search engines on the Web today and Ask.com is one of them. I will talk about how search engines work in general and discuss the challenges search engines face today. I will focus on various aspects of relevance in general and especially on one of the interesting & unique features at Ask.com, viz., "related search". Time permitting we can also delve into various verticals--beyond websearch--into image search, blogs & rss-feed search.