A Search Engine Explanation

A search engine, such as Google and Yahoo, are tools that allow users to find information on the World Wide Web by searching with a specially designed tool. The results of a search are organized into a list which includes web pages, information about them and links to them. In some cases, it includes images. Search engines are operated algorithmically in conjunction with human editing.

A search engine uses web crawling, indexing and searching in that order to provide the most accurate results related to a particular search. Search engines work by storing information about millions of web pages that can be retrieved at the request of its user. The web crawler, or “spider,” is used as an automated web browser. It follows every appropriate visible link. The web crawler analyzes the contents of each link to determine how the pages should be indexed.

Descriptions and meta tags are analyzed to determine the type of webpage and its purpose. The meta tags are behind the scenes in the webpage and the viewer never sees them while browsing the page. The search engine uses them as a quick scan to get the idea or theme of the page and then the entire contents of the webpage will be evaluated to ensure the tags are correct and the page is valid.

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.

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.

Page rank is latest addition in the techniques used by search engines to sort out various web pages and their contents. Page rank decides the relevance of a particular page by studying the correlation between its meta tags, descriptions, keywords used and the content of that webpage. The search engines rank those sites high that have association with high ranked web pages. The page rank is essential for any web page or site as it determines its probability of featuring at the top of any particular search.

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