What is a Search Engine and how does it work
What
is a Search Engine?
Let us first see the meaning of the term Search Engine. A Search Engine is a web site designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. People search for information like web pages, images, files, software etc. on internet. Search Engines handle their operations algorithmically. An algorithm is a method for solving a problem using a finite sequence of instructions and they are used for calculation, data processing, and many other fields. Search Engines store information about web pages in their servers in an index database for use in subsequent queries. In this process, the contents of each page are analyzed and indexed in a particular manner. This index allows the information to be found as quickly as possible.
How
Search Engine works?
A web page may contain numerous types of information such as text or words, static images and animated images, audio and video, interactive text, buttons, forms, comments, link files, scripts and many other things are added day by day. All these information or the contents as we call it, in each web page are analysed by the Search Engine operator before storing them in their servers. For example, words are extracted from the titles, headings, tags and keywords.
What happens when someone enters a query into a search engine? The Search Engine then examines its index and displays a list of best-matching web pages. Usually the list comes with a short summary of each page including the title and parts of the text.
A search engine will be considered useful or not by the user depending on the relevance of the results it gives in response to the querry of the user. Out of millions of web pages which include the word or combination of words given in the search, some may be more relevant than others and some may be more popular. Some web pages may be more authoritative on the subject than others. Search engines use various methods to rank the results according to their relevance or popularity or other factors and provide the best results to the user. These methods vary from one search engine to another and from time to time, one search engine may also change the methods with the changes in user paterns and technological developments.
Matt Cutts, a software engineer in the quality group at Google has explained how Google collects and ranks search results on Google Librarian Central. Currently, Google is the most popular search engine in the world. Therefore it is recommended to visit the site and read if you are interested in obtaining a detailed knowledge of how Google search engine works.
Major types of Search Engines
Type
| Examples
| |
---|---|---|
General search engines
| Google
| |
Yahoo!
| ||
Bing
| ||
Baido (Chinese)
| ||
Ask.com
| ||
Yandex (Russian)
| ||
News
| Yahoo! News
| |
Google News
| ||
AltaVista News
| ||
AlltheWeb News
| ||
Business
| Business.com
| |
Multimedia
| Google Video
| |
Yahoo! Video
|
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