A Search Engine Explained

With the widespread growth of the World Wide Web a specially designed tool to search through the information available was developed called the search engine. Using both algorithms and human editing the search engine will present results organized in a list consisting of web pages, information, links, and images. These results are viewed by the user after inputting a keyword or keyword phrase in to the search engines search field.

Web crawling, indexing and searching combine in that order to obtain the most accurate results. Mass amounts of information on millions of web sites are stored and then retrieved relevant to the user’s request. A web crawler is also known as a spider, it analyzes every link and indexes all information for faster retrieval.

Mata tags and even words from the webpage are studied to classify the webpage and its content. All these data are stored for future usage.

All the search engines work on more or less the same principle. Google stores the source pages, also called cache, of all the web pages along with information available on the webpage itself. AltaVista differs slightly in operation as it stores everything that a web page has on offer.

Search engines will examine keywords entered by the user and obtain a list of organized search results. Summaries may also accompany web links on the results page.

Many filters and specialized web crawlers create a proprietary method for analyzing web pages for results. While a keyword can be found a very large amount of websites not all sites are relevant to the users purpose and companies pride themselves on result relevancy.

Increasingly search engines have been implementing a page ranking system in which each page’s descriptions, keywords and content are scanned for relevancy to the inputted keyword and their index. Pages with higher ranks get seen more often at the top of the list. If a site is linked to a high ranking website that site receives a vote that increases its ranking.

Justin Harrison is an internationally recognised Internet Marketing Consultant who provides world class SEO Services to website owners. For more information visit: http://www.seorankings.co.za

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