Search Engines - How and Why Work the Way They Do

Have you ever wondered how search engines work and the reasons why the search results appear the way that they do? If you have there’s a good chance you typed in the words “how search engines work” and found this article to educate yourself on the subject. This relates because that is originally the reason the internet was started- to share information across a relatively easy to use platform. Although the way search engines work has changed since then and will continue to change, they still have fundamentals that remain the same.

1. Crawling
2. Storage
3. Retrieval
4. Ranking

Search engines work on an indexing system based on words or combinations of words. They keep an index of the words they find, and where they find them. They have special software tools called spiders that build lists of words found on websites. The process of building lists is called web crawling. The words that the spider’s index are located in the HTML code, or backend, of a website. The HTML code of a website is not seen by users on a website, but is seen by the spiders so this is why it is important the text contains certain relevant words, called keywords, that are popular amongst searchers looking to find that information on a website.

Today’s top search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing) must then be able to index hundreds of millions of webpages and respond to tens of millions of search queries every day. Before the search engine can display the results it feels are relevant to the search, the webpages must be found. The exact ways to get a website to rank well are unknown, as the search engines employ secret algorithms to the websites rankings. What we can do is make educated guesses as to what works and what does not.

Knowing what we know about the way search engines work we realize that the search engines goal is to find the most relevant content according to searches. This is dependent largely upon popularity of a webpage, links to that page that contain relevant information, and other evidence that suggests that a particular webpage provides the information that people are looking for.

Owners of websites should familiarize themselves with meta-tags as these allow them to specify keywords and concepts under which they wish the page to be indexed. Just as a title of a book or article gives a first glimpse into what it might be about, meta tags provide the same information to the search engines. The search engines also correlate the meta tags with page content, to ensure the tags have relevant information to how they are labeled.

For more about how search engines work check out this video by SEOMoz.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-how-search-engines-work

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