Search adaptations and the challenges of the Web

Search has become a hot topic in Internet computing, with rival search engines battling to become the de facto Web portal, harnessing search algorithms to wade through information on a scale undreamed of by early information retrieval (IR) pioneers. This article examines how search has matured from its roots in specialized IR systems to become a key foundation of the Web. The authors describe new challenges posed by the Web´s scale, and show how search is changing the nature of the Web as much as the Web has changed the nature of search.