TEK is an
email
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...
-based
search engine developed by the TEK project at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
. The search engine enables users to search
the Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web s ...
using only email. It is intended to be used by people with low internet connectivity (for example, high-priced internet connection and low
bandwidth
Bandwidth commonly refers to:
* Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range
* Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...
connection in
developing countries
A developing country is a sovereign state with a lesser developed industrial base and a lower Human Development Index (HDI) relative to other countries. However, this definition is not universally agreed upon. There is also no clear agreem ...
).
TEK stands for "Time Equals Knowledge"; the search engine compensates the searching availability to the time needed for searching. To perform a
web search
Web most often refers to:
* Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal
* World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system
Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to:
Computing
* WEB, a literate programming system created by ...
, a user sends a query via email to a server (which is located at
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
). The server then performs the search using existing search engines, downloads actual pages, and emails a subset of those pages back to the user.
References
*Levison L, Thies B, Amarasinghe S. The TEK Search Engine. Development by design workshop, MIT, Boston, MA. July 2001. http://tek.sourceforge.net/papers/tek-dyd01.pdf
External links
TEK Project
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Internet search engines