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What is a search engine?

Everyday many people use Google, Yahoo. MSN without knowing really what is a search engine. Whether you have put up hundreds of websites or you have just launched your very first website you have without a doubt used a search engine to find something on the Internet. Internet users perform hundreds of millions of searches each day to find information or products that they are interested in. They use popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and many directories such as DMOZ to look for things. It takes just seconds to enter a word or phrase into the search box and "presto" search engine results pages (SERPs) pop up for the user listing web pages ranging in number from several hundred pages to several hundred million pages depending on the search term. People turn to the Internet to do research on the most obscure of items. Search engines have made finding the proverbial "needle in a haystack" a reality.

Let's look at a simple to understand analogy, you ask the librarian to help you find a book related to something you are researching. The librarian checks the catalog of books and takes you to the area of the library where you find a row or many rows of books related to the subject. Technically speaking, a search engine is computer program designed to efficiently retrieve information that is requested by a user from a library of information indexed (more on indexing later) on a computer or a network of computers. A search engine receives a query of specific criteria (request for information) and looks for exact and close matching items in the cataloged index of web pages then delivers the results to you. A search engine streamlines the process to find information on the Internet.

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How does a search engine work?

A search engine creates an index of web pages in order to rapidly find information. It takes milliseconds to search an index of thousands of web pages versus taking hours to search through all the web pages stored on the Internet. The search engine uses a program (a bot – short for robot) to browse the World Wide Web in a manner that retrieves information about web pages and catalogs this information in a database (the index). Because of the vast amount of web pages on the Internet, the number of which is estimated to have surpassed over 8 billion pages in 2007, a search engine only indexes a small percentage of the total of all the web pages. The search engine bot uses a set of algorithms (secretly guarded rules) to define the relevancy of the web page that eventually determine if a web page is to be indexed. The most relevant web pages make into the search engine's index. Using the library analogy again, a library does not have every book that has ever been printed, but has a defined number of books that would be considered an accurate index of information covering many topics. 

How does the search engine know which pages to show you in a search?

When you perform a search for specific information, the search engine looks at the words you have entered into the search form. It then takes the only the terms it needs and sends a bot (a program) to the area of the index that is related to the subject. The bot using a set of algorithms based on your search terms reviews web pages in the index to decide which web pages are to be ultimately listed on search engine results page (SERP). Generally, the exact match or the most relevant matches are listed at or near the top of the SERP where the less and least relevant matches appear in descending order toward the bottom of the list of results. In theory, the more accurately the index has been created by the search engine, then the more accurate the results the user should receive for the search query.

Now armed with the list of web pages on the SERP, the user can begin looking at the web sites for the information sought after.

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