Search Engines Explained In Basic Terms
A search engine is a device that delivers contents to you as per your query from the World Wide Web. Search engine locates the suitable content from the plethora of information available on WWW in form of links, images and web pages. These engines are based on complex algorithms and sometimes even on human editing.
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.
Cache storage helps in keeping track of the updates on the web page and helps in filtering. The system of indexing used by Google makes sure that only the updated contents are made available to its users by doing away with linkrot. The cache has further usage in finding the updated content that has been removed. It helps in recovering the contents as an archives source. The search process starts with a user keying in some keyword or keyword phrase, related to the content they are looking for, in the search box of an engine. The engine then uses the process of indexing to produce web pages that suit the search phrase the most. The list will include a short description of the contents that each webpage has to offer.
The goal of major search engines is to supply the most relevant results. Not all sites with the requested keywords are relevant to the search. The search engines have used their spiders and indexing to filter out useless information. They generate their own system for analyzing a website for content.
Some search engines use page rankings to assist in their sifting. The search engines look at each individual page and determine through their meta tags, descriptions, keywords and content if the sites are relevant based on the key words in the search. The higher a site is ranked, the higher to the top of the results inventory it will be. The search engine sometimes uses other websites to help determine how highly a site should be ranked. If your page is linked to a higher page, it means that your page will have a higher rank in the search outcome.
