How Search Engines Work

I have been writing articles for a local magazine about the Internet, what it is and what is does for people. They're republished here...

April 08 - How search Engines work
When it comes to finding information, and promoting your business, Search engines are the most important aspect of the Internet. The best-known, and most frequently used, search engines are Google, Yahoo! and MSN and, in the English speaking world, these account for around 95% of the monthly searches.

Search engines allow you to find documents and resources on the web by matching your search keywords with the closest, and most important, matches in their database.

The easiest way to visualise a search engine is to think of it as a traditional card index system where records are kept alphabetically. All search engines work in much the same way and they are based on three main pieces of software

  1. The Spider

The spider ‘crawls’ the Internet, moving from site to site, collecting information about each and every page that it visits. Spiders have to visit billions of web-pages every hour so they tend not to spend too long on each site. They collect information about the content of each page – words and pictures, which sites link to each page and to where each page links.

  1. The Index

The Index organises all the content that the spiders collect and files it into some structure so that it can then be easily retrieved. The more information The Spider can collect about a certain web-page, the more chance The Index has of correctly filing that page. Search engine indices are massive with the Google index alone containing an estimated 25 billion pages.

  1. The Search

The Search is the consumer facing interface that all Internet users are familiar with. It’s the simple looking rectangular box where you type your search query and then ‘web search’. The Search function matches your search query against pages listed within the search engines index, ranking the most appropriate phrase first, the next second etc.

There is a further search engine functions that is responsible for the growth in Google from being a small search engine started by two mathematicians to being a Fortune 100 company in less than 10 years. This function is the Pay Per Click search where you can pay to be at the top of search results for your chosen key search words. We’ll take a look at Pay Per Click in more detail in a future article,

This explanation is a massive simplification of a hugely complex machine that processes billions of web pages in a fraction of a second every time you do a search. If you run a business, getting towards the top of search results for your search terms can mean the difference between make or break.

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Google

Formed in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford maths graduates, Google is today as much a part of the Internet as websites and email. The business was incorporated in 1998 and, within 10 years, was generating $16billion in revenues and employing more than 10,000 people worldwide. The largest part of this revenue is a result of Adwords, Google’s Pay Per Click advertising search engine, a concept developed with Google labs where engineers have, for 20% of their time, the freedom to develop their own ideas.

 

 

 


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