August 24, 2009
Search Engines Explained In Basic Terms
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.
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.
Words found inside the pages are extracted from the description and allocated appropriate meta tags. Meta tags are also taken from contents the webpage itself to establish its relevance. Data from the sites is collected, indexed and stored to be retrieved when it's needed.
Companies such as Google store all or part of the source web page, while AltaVista stores every page word for word. The information stored and indexed is known as the cache, it allows for instant updating and keeps the searching filtered with ease. An important factor for a successful search engine is its ability to provide active and useable information with minimal to no linkrot. The cache also saves an archive of a removed source that can later be access by the user after the site is updated.
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.
All the search engines look to enhance their performance by ensuring that they deliver exactly what the user looks for. The problem is accentuated by the abundance of web pages containing the keyword or the keyword phrase. However, by using web crawlers and indexing, search engines manage to filter all the sites that are irrelevant to the search being made even if it has the keywords. They have created their own unique processes for examining different web pages and their contents.
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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