[Tutor] (no subject)

[Jayprasad J. Hegde]

Hello Cameron, 

On Sun, May 04, 2003 at 10:23:02PM -0500, Cameron Stoner wrote:
> How are search engines created for example google or the word searches in a 
> help index?

This is quite a general question and I am not sure how this is
connected with learning more about Python. 

Anyway, here's something for you...

	Creating Search Engines belongs to an area called as
Information Retrieval. Creating search engines cannot be summarized
here. However, in case you are interested you can read up more on it
in books like "Modern Information Retrieval" by Baeza-Yates for a more
contemporary outlook, or "Information Retrieval: Data Structures and
Algorithms" by the same author, for a more practical one.

The theory and practice of creating indexes is a subfield under
Information Retrieval and I think, this is what you are looking out
for.  Indices are data structures which allow for faster query
handling. You can read about this in the books mentioned above and
learn more about popular indexing approaches like Inverted Indices,
Suffix Trees, Signature files, etc. -- or you can read up more about
this by searching on Google; there's plenty of stuff available online.

Hope this helps. 

Regards, 
- JJH
-- 
Power corrupts.  Absolute power is kind of neat.
		-- John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy, 1981-1987
[ Jayprasad J. Hegde, Staff Scientist, KBCS Division, National Centre for
Software Technology, Juhu, Mumbai 400049, India. Tel:+91-22-26201606x373 ]