Definition Of Search Engine

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If you are looking for a specific piece of information on the Internet, you would have to spend literally days sifting through the millions of sites if it were not for search engines. Search engines are simply programs that do the searching for you. They use the words or phrases, called keywords that you have input into their request box to locate websites that contain the information you are looking for. Popular search engines, like Google, Bing and Ask, processes millions of requests every day. They churn out search engine result pages, loaded with websites, in mere seconds. When you consider the sheer amount of data contained on the web, it is easy to understand how truly amazing these programs are.

Without search engines, we would have a hard time accessing information. Using the internet would be akin to using a phone book that wasn’t in alphabetical order to look up a phone number †it would take you days to manually locate the specific name you were searching for.

All search engines work in pretty much the same way. They use specialized bots called ‘spiders’ ...
... to crawl websites. The information the spiders collect is then indexed. A search engine index is like a huge spreadsheet that tracks things like the number of times a keyword is used on a website. The search engine than uses the index to rank common websites and provide users with a list of websites that are most likely to fit their needs.

The way that search engines rank websites is a bit complicated. Each search engine uses a different complex algorithm that is proprietary. In other words, the general public doesn’t know exactly what information search engines look at to determine what sites are relevant to a particular search. Web designers do have an idea of what the search engines look at. We know, for example, that there are ways to make a website more attractive to a spider and more likely to be indexed. Things like keyword density, updated content, site maps and links all play a role in how a site is indexed.

Another important facet of search engines is paid results. Websites can bid for premium spots on a search engine results page. Typically set to the side, or listed under the heading ‘paid advertising,’ these results do not appear based on the search engine algorithm, they appear because someone bought that position. Some searches avoid paid advertisements, but in most cases they are legitimate websites that do use the keyword or term you searched for throughout their site.

Defining a search engine isn’t a difficult process †what is more difficult is understanding all of the factors that go into developing a list of related websites for your search. Still, the search engine is still the best, and only way, to sort through all of the information available on the Internet and find the one piece that you are looking for.