| Summary: | The web has made an incredible amount of unorganized information available to anyone. There are search engines that help us structuring the information, but it is still difficult to find what you search for on the web. The purpose of this master's thesis is to investigate whether the already existing techniques for automatic indexing are suited for the new information retrieval context on the web and how the choice to support these techniques, or not, affects the search results. This is examined through a literature study on automatic indexing and other related concepts, such as information retrieval and information searching on the web in order to get a theoretical frame to the work and by an observation of the search engine HotBot to approach the purpose of the thesis. The observation is carried out by searching HotBot's database and investigating the search results in order to try to identify patterns that can reveal something about how HotBot's automatic indexing is done. Even after a number of searches it has been difficult to see clear patterns in HotBot's indexing and the search engine has rather been found inconsequent in several ways. The web presents an information retrieval environment where automatic indexing is necessary, but the information systems of today can not stand up to the demand, that they should represent the content of a text. It is not possible to draw any general conclusions after observing one search engine, but it might be so that the existing techniques for automatic indexing need to be improved to better suit the text collections on the web by further research. === Uppsatsnivå: D
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