TEK is an
email
Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...
-based
search engine
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
developed by the TEK project at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...
. The search engine enables users to search
the Web
The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists. It allows documents and other web ...
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 less-developed Secondary sector of the economy, industrial base and a lower Human Development Index (HDI) relative to developed countries. However, this definition is not universally agreed upon. ...
).
TEK stands for "Time Equals Knowledge"; the search engine compensates the searching availability to the time needed for searching. To perform a
web search
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the search results are typically ...
, a user sends a query via email to a server (which is located at
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...
). 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