How Search Engines Work
There are four big search engines. Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask. They cover just about all searches ever done online.
Search engines actually have a series of parts or functions.
Firstly they have to find web sites, and they can do this in 2 different ways. There are crawler or spider based search engines and human powered search engines. Crawler based search engines have automatic programs that crawl the web looking at web pages and following links to other web pages. Human powered search engines rely on an army of people reading submissions of web sites from people like me, looking at the web site and deciding on a category for that web site.
Once the search engine knows that the site exists it adds it to its index. The index is simply a huge database of information about every single web site it has ever found, billions of the things.
The final job of the search engine is to take searches and present results, something that they do literally billions of times every day.
All quite simple so far?
The critical bit as far as any web site owner is concerned is the third bit, presenting the results. Why? Because the Internet is huge, even for the simplest results you get millions of responses. Because you get millions of responses you have to rank the results in some kind of order. Ranking the results is complicated... very complicated.
The search engine looks at where in your website certain keywords specified in the search occur. They will look near the top of the body text, in headings, page titles, descriptions of pictures and links. The frequency and positioning of the words all makes a difference.
Each search engine also adds it's own different factors to the ranking process, a lot of them are a closely and carefully guarded secret. One of these is Google's page rank technology. This is can be summed up by saying "the more web sites that link to yours the better" This is something you can organise for free, but makes a huge difference to your web site's page ranking.
Search engines actually have a series of parts or functions.
Firstly they have to find web sites, and they can do this in 2 different ways. There are crawler or spider based search engines and human powered search engines. Crawler based search engines have automatic programs that crawl the web looking at web pages and following links to other web pages. Human powered search engines rely on an army of people reading submissions of web sites from people like me, looking at the web site and deciding on a category for that web site.
Once the search engine knows that the site exists it adds it to its index. The index is simply a huge database of information about every single web site it has ever found, billions of the things.
The final job of the search engine is to take searches and present results, something that they do literally billions of times every day.
All quite simple so far?
The critical bit as far as any web site owner is concerned is the third bit, presenting the results. Why? Because the Internet is huge, even for the simplest results you get millions of responses. Because you get millions of responses you have to rank the results in some kind of order. Ranking the results is complicated... very complicated.
The search engine looks at where in your website certain keywords specified in the search occur. They will look near the top of the body text, in headings, page titles, descriptions of pictures and links. The frequency and positioning of the words all makes a difference.
Each search engine also adds it's own different factors to the ranking process, a lot of them are a closely and carefully guarded secret. One of these is Google's page rank technology. This is can be summed up by saying "the more web sites that link to yours the better" This is something you can organise for free, but makes a huge difference to your web site's page ranking.
Labels: Google, google page rank, search engines
