business policy and Strategic management

Evolution of Internet Search Engines

Most people could not have predicted how crucial search engines would become in supporting today's trade two decades ago. Search engines can now be used to find any type of information on people, places, objects, and more. Some queries on Internet search engines are conducted only for business, study, amusement, or entertainment. Many searches, however, are filled with logic, and the results might influence significant decisions concerning someone's life, health, or a large purchase, or an entrepreneur's hunt for an acquisition target.Internet search engines are evolving to become trusted guides that enhance the entire online experience, instead of being mere signposts that point the way to a lost traveler on the Internet landscape (Hill, 7).

The Strategic Implications of Internet Search Engines

The main goal of this work is to articulate the strategic implications of internet search engines and offer action insights for managers and researchers. Search engines are no longer just mere information tools. In fact, they are powerful agents of transformation that are making the business environment more transparent, and thus, potentially more competitive.

The Role of Search Engines in Business

Search engines, such as Google and Yahoo! Search, are more than just portals or information tools. This new environment is creating opportunities and challenges for businesses of every stripe. In this case study I will explore the following components; what are search engines exactly, what businesses can do with search engines and how are, and how should, senior executives be viewing the strategic impact of search engines, and what are some important research issues for academics and practitioners that would help us gain a better understanding of the strategic impact of search engines (Mellahi, 12).

The Importance of Internet Search Engine Companies

Internet search engine companies have not been in existence for quite long with most of them coming into existence around the mid-1990s. Most of these companies have already gone or in a condition of gobbling each other up so as to compete with the bigger companies. Yahoo tends to be the pillar of the currently existing crop starting in 1994. The gradual growth in internet usage and the capacity of data available has made it possible and easily finding that information more important. The internet search engine companies and search engine strategies have become very essential to webmasters and companies marketing strategies for business organizations because of the desire of companies to have their products and services appear on top of the list and the most used internet search sites. The methodologies which a company uses for searching is highly regarded confidential. Some search companies get its search line data from Google, for instance, Yahoo did this for some time, and now AOL Search has been enhanced by the Google search engine. The companies earn their revenues in a several of ways, but primarily it is paid advertising that is the primary parent of this industry.

The Functionality of Internet Search Engines

Information on how internet search engine technologies, their capabilities today and in the future, and be able to articulate how these search engines help both the users and providers of content to manage huge business related activities and processes. This enables managers to have a strategic plan on how to achieve their goals using these internet search engines. To begin with, the outset, it is essential to clearly understand what an internet search engine does because there are some opinions about internet search engines.

Understanding Internet Search Engines

It is believed that when a user submits a query to a search engine, for example, Google, the search engine searches the Web, and then produces results that the user needs. An internet search engine does not search the network to improve responsiveness but instead searches an internal index having a taxonomy of the correct elements of the content domain covered by it. In broad terms, an internet search engine is made up of three components namely; crawler, indexer and a reporter. Also, they also contain several additional components to oversee the bidding process for sponsored links, also referred to as paid placements. The system also contains several other forms of information that help in determining the necessity of each page for the satisfaction of a user query. However, despite their remarkable success, internet search engines are still poor at delivering services what the users want. They are still poor at assisting people to identify exactly what they want, much less what they want, especially when users do not have a clear clue of what they are searching for. Search engines only attempt to find the best match between what the users ask for and what is available within their indices. Search engines do not do a good work of assessing specifically what the user needs because they lack knowledge of the context that made the user generate the search query. Further, the ambiguities of language make it hard to know the true meaning of the user's query (Hill, 19).

Improving Search Results with Contextualization

More sophisticated ways of improving the quality of search results is to contextualize the search process through better tagging of Web pages (e.g., social tagging of pages; automated metadata extraction of context information) and developing improved understanding of the semantic links between words (i.e., schemas based on how each word relates to other words and information). In business tagging, users can attach tags showing the metadata about specific content, such as a song, which are then used by the search engines to correctly characterize those contents (Mellahi, 24). An emerging approach is contextual internet search engines, where the search engine works automated semantic analysis and refinement of structured and unstructured data and rich media relevant to the search query, and dynamically interprets the contextual meaning of the contents.

Works cited

Hill, Charles W. L, and Gareth R. Jones. Strategic Management: An Integrated Approach. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. Print.

Mellahi, Kamel. Global Strategic Management. , n.d.. Print.