Understanding Search Engines

Understanding search engines, their importance in internet and how they work is as essential for any internet savvy person as it is important for a health conscious individual to understand the importance, benefits and ways of keeping fit.

Search engines are the vehicles that take the website surfing passengers to their desired website destination within seconds. Just imagine if these vehicles were not there, how would people have reached the specific websites they were looking for? It is the search engines only that help and guide the web surfers to locate almost anything on the web. With more and more people getting exposed to the internet everyday, and a new website getting added every second, minute, or hour, it would have been insanity to find out the information you are looking for, had the sophisticated search engines not been there.

Different Search engines have different features. But basically three types of search engines exist right now:

Those that are based on crawlers/spiders
Those that are powered by human submissions
Those that are a combination of the two mentioned above

The search engines that are based upon spiders send their spiders out into the cyberspace where the spiders visit different websites, reading information on them, the site's meta tags , and the links the individual sites connect to. This information is brought back and indexed in the central depository. It is not a one time visit by the spiders to the websites. In fact they keep visiting the sites to check for any change, updation or modification in the sites. Depending upon the search engine administrators' decision, the duration and number of visits to the websites are decided.

The search engines that fall in the second category of human submissions rely basically upon humans to submit information to be indexed and catalogued. Only submitted information is put in the index.

So when a searcher enters a query in the search box of the search engines, the spiders search for the most specific and relevant information or website matching your query through the index. You are not actually searching the web, but the huge databases of information that are created by collecting, storing and retrieving the information. This should answer your question of some search results leading to dead links. If the index is not updated since the time of a web page becoming invalid, the search engines still consider the page to be active and display the dead end link till the time the index is updated.

Search engines are looking for frequency and location of the keywords on a web page. Higher the frequency, more relevant will be the web site. The algorithms also study the way the web pages link to other pages in the web. This gives valuable information to the search engines about the website's main purpose and whether the page is important enough to increase the ranking of the site concerned.

This brings us to another important question of different search engines giving different search results. You must be wondering why? Well it is because different search engines have different indices, just like different doctors have their own unique way of attending to patients with the same ailments. The search engines may be using different algorithms to search and determine the relevance of the information in the index to what the searcher is looking for.

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