Search engines(in a nutshell)

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The world wide web is made up of pages

wSquillions of pages

w

By Olddanb on Flickr

Search engines use web crawlers (or spiders) to trawl the world wide web looking at pages and indexing information on them such as headlines, titles, text and metadata

By Tim Dorr on Flickr

Search engines store the indexed information about web pages for later reference

t“Swimming pool safety”

(Key words)

When we type keywords into a search engine…

…the search engine looks through the indexed pages for our keywords

It singles out the pages that feature our keywords and has a closer look

± How many times keywords appear± Where keywords appear± Page title± A few more things

It calculates how often and how prominently our keywords appear on each page

Secret sauce

Then it determines the relevance of the pages (Google’s PageRank) …

… by counting how many websites are linking to a page. This one has only a few links

This one has lots. Google figures this page has already shown itself to be popular so it’s likely to have useful content and be more relevant to you

The list of web pages displayed in the search results have been RANKED in order of relevance and according to the keyword and other calculations

Pretty quickly, too

Which just goes to show how important keywords are

Wikipedia on search enginesAbout.com on search engines

You can read more about search engines on these websites

The End

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