What's the important part of search technology?

Question

What's the important part of search technology?

Distributed file system

Cloud computing

Storage system

Ranking algorithms

Search algorithms

Or something else?

Answer 1

Indexing?

Answer 2

Search and Ranking are critically important, same with indexing. You need efficient algorithms to find results that closely match the keywords I entered (ala google, yahoo, etc.) and then you need to rank those results.

Answer 3

//Begin sarcastic answer

RAM + CPU + Bandwidth + Really Awesome Search Engine Software

//End sarcastic answer

Seriously though, something as complicated as search technology is going to hinge on a multitude of issues, as you've already listed. Trying to pin it to one singular silver bullet is really not applicable.

Answer 4

I think the bigger problem that has yet to be conquered in search is Onotology. We have a very difficult time understanding and categorizing the results in a human friendly way. Some call this the 'semantic web'. We have this exaflood of data and indexes, but we categorize or make good sense of it a very poor way. The fault lies in our lack of being atomically self-expressive in a way that search (the algorithm) can understand.

Answer 5

Performance in a search engine is critical; a slow service is a dead one, but it's not the most important aspect; that badge, I think, goes to the relevance of results.

We ask search engines to do the impossible; to take a phrase or a few keywords and somehow return a whole bunch of results that relate exactly to what we wanted - we may not know exactly what we were looking for, but as soon as we see it, we can recognise it. Likewise, we know instantly when the search engine is returning the "wrong thing".

Ultimately, it's all about getting a dumb machine to do what we mean, not what we say, which is basically an unsolvable problem in computing. The best-quality search solutions are always going to be those which have the most novel ways of ranking results and relating them to our original queries. This notion is quite heavily tied in to that of ontology, as Wayne Hartman describes in his answer.

Answer 6

I built a small search engine as part of my final year project and I can tell you that an inverted index is an important part of a search engine.

I could also say the Crawler is an important part.

You could also say the Page Rank algorithm is important.

You can argue clustering is important.

....

What exactly are you looking for? your question seems to broad to me.