Gone fishing!

Another day had passed in Mosaic Land.
I was feeling a bit tired and exhausted.
My walk has taken me to a stream...
The stream is flowing restlessly..
However, upon closer inspection, I saw something peculiar...
The stream seems to sparkle with an unnatural shine...
The surface of the stream looks like a big TV screen that shows random pictures...


On the bank of the stream, an old beaten sign reads: Caution! Data stream ahead...


Fishing in the data stream?
Isn't that what you and I has been doing for years...
No? then how did you manage to complete those projects, homeworks and research?

Searching for informations online is a skill to be honed in this era of technological advancement.
Without the proper fishing rod, you'll have a hard time catching any useful data in this stream.

The fishing rods I mentioned refer specifically to search engines.

Well, as we all know, Google, Yahoo!, Bing!, MSN and Altavista are the most commonly used search engines, but what you do not know is that there are a lot of difference between them.

Different rods are used to catch different fishes...
Use the right rod and fishing suddenly becomes a breeze......

Here's the thing:

Google


Google is what we call an index.
It searches for the keywords over all the websites added into its massive database.
If your keyword is found in any of the website in its database, it will return the url to you as a link.
This type of search engine usually returns a large amount of data but the data are of lower quality.
For example: If I were to search for the word "bleach" it will return a mixture of data related to "Bleach" the anime and chemical bleach used for washing and bleaching clothes.

Yahoo!

Yahoo! is a web directory.
Its function is akin to a phone directory.
It looks for your keyword in its database, at the same time, it looks for any websites that are related to your keyword.
As a result, you get everything that are RELATED to your keyword instead of websites that merely CONTAINS your keyword.
However, this can be quite annoying if u are in a rush as you have to sift through a lot of information.

Bing!

A web directory similar to Yahoo! by Microsoft.
Rumors has it that Yahoo! and Microsoft are having a deal and soon, Yahoo will be fully replaced by Bing!
Therefore, not much has to be said about Bing! as it is a lot of ways, similar to Yahoo!.

MSN

A web portal by Microsoft.
It does not only provides search engine , it also shows the latest news and global issue.
It is a homepage in most countries, shows a lot of relevant informations and is the best email provider so far (as far as I am concerned).
However, sometimes it is hard to load...
and the loading somehow takes the edge of things...

AltaVista

Alta vista is a crawler...
Crawlers are something we can imagine as spiders who crawls on the web in search of the information you want.
However, AltaVista's popularity has waned as most users prefers Google's indexing search.
Why? Because crawlers and indexes both returns the same information, but indexes are much faster and more responsive than crawlers.

Walking away from the data stream,
I started to wonder, 
Is there an end to the flow of binaries in the stream?
Or is the flow infinite?