How does a search engine work?
Google…Yahoo!…AdWords….MSN….AltaVista.
When you’re looking to find information on any subject, be it the full list of Olympic host cities or the recipe for the perfect winter’s meal – more often than not you head straight to your favourite search engine. But how do they find exactly what you’re looking for with just a few simple words?
An internet search engine lets you explore the World Wide Web for information relating to keywords you type in. To build up its ‘memory’ a search engine continually browses the web using a program called a web crawler. These information machines methodically sift through the countless websites online and add them to a database.
Key words within these websites, such as page titles, headings and image names are then saved in the search engine database to be retrieved when internet users like you and I conduct future searches. For example, if you’re looking for as much information as possible on Westnet, your search engine trawls through its database for websites relating to or featuring the word Westnet.
The order in which the results appear (a list sometimes running into the millions) is determined by a range of factors like relevance and popularity – even the history of the web page itself.
Each search engine will employ different methods to decide the way your list of search results is returned. In an effort to narrow your search, try searching your key words with or without inverted commas – see if you can notice a difference!
Tip: Once you’ve found the exact website you’re looking for, add the page to your “Favourites” or bookmark it so you can return to the page later without searching again.
Posted by josh.nicholson