Know all about what the “beast” does behind the back of your website, in an easy to understand non-technical language. Deeper knowledge about a search engine work is crucial to the selection of keywords for your website.
Before talking about the working principle of a SE (search engine) lets know about the exact definition of SE.
The World Wide Web is filled with billions of web pages. It is impossible for anyone to find information from the web without the help of a refined system.
In response to a query the search engines work using these complicated computer software and search all their indices, at their own back end, and retrieve data based on some criteria, especially one that searches the Internet for documents containing certain specified keywords.
A Web search engine works as a tool (read computer program) designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results, commonly called hits, are presented in a list and may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files.
Search engines work with very sophisticated computer programs, called algorithms, and collect data from the websites available on the internet. They have a very detailed and intriguing filing system where all the collected data is filed or “indexed” as they call it. Obviously the indexing is done based on certain predefined criteria which help in the search engine work of retrieving back that information whenever called for.
How does a search engine works?
A search engine is a three faced “beast”.
While only one face is visible to the world it cleverly manages to make invisible to the naked eye its other two faces. The other two faces work incognito.Let’s look deeper and find out its working before we can “dissect” it for our profitability. We need to know what it feeds on so that we can tame it by supplying enough of what it wants.
First the invisible faces.
Face -1: The Spider Face?
This is what “crawls” into your website, on submission, and collects all the vital information about your website.
It is not interested in the HTML or Java script or other programming languages of your pages. Amongst other things a search engine works to look for the following:
- - Looks at the Title of the page
- - Looks at the Description of the page
- - Notes down the Primary and Secondary Keywords
- - Reads the Textual Content in the webpage
- - Verifies the quality of the content
- - Checks for the relevance of the content with the Meta Tag Information
- - Checks for the quantum of information
- - Loves and looks hungrily for all Incoming and Outgoing Links
- - Feeds itself on all the URL mentioned
While it is good to know what it likes, it will not hurt to also know what it does no’t really care about. These are some of the things that basically don’t come on the way of a search engine while searching:
- - It cares little or nothing about the simplicity, complexity, intricacy, or novelty of your html or javascript or any other jargon used to create special effects
- - It has short sight (it can only “crawl”) and hence does no’t really appreciate or look into any photos or graphics. It is always hungry for more textual kind of fodder.
- - It is color blind and hence does no’t know the difference between black, red or green or all those funny colors that you want to splash all around on your webpage.
- - It does no’t know how to read buttons, and thus does no’t care much about navigation bar, buttons or what is deceptively written on them. But it does relish on Links of all kinds.
All this and much more is what the search engine spiders do and that too at a remarkable speed.
Face -2: The Storekeeper Face?
It collects all the information about various web pages that is supplied by the spiders and like a hard working employee diligently puts the inventory in appropriate “shelves”.
The “storekeeper face” is responsible for putting to order all the raw stock for immediate retrieval.
This is where all the top computer experts engaged by the search engine companies all over the world, work at fabricating complex software codes, to assist the “storekeeper face” of the search engine.
The hard working employee keeps updating this information practically everyday so as to supply latest results when sought for. That’s because the quality of information a search engine supplies in response to your queries is what keeps it in business.
And now the visible face.
Face -3: The Simpleton Face?
This “Face” of a search engine, which is the only visible face, is the most innocuous looking and simple fellow kind of a face. It makes you feel that a search engine is a like a small little “pet” and not a “beast”. It presents itself to the world in the shape of a rectangular window where you can enter your desired keyword.
Have you seen the Google home page? There is a lot of white space and a longish rectangular window right in the middle, invoking you to feed in some words, called query, so that it can throw back its valuable results at you.
As soon as you hit the search button after filling in the keyword box, this face of the search engine works to match your query with the name tags on the “shelves” in its own go-down, and with the speed of light, returns to you so much information, that it is difficult for you to digest it all in one go.
And quite humbly it calls it output as “hits”.
We call this the smart work. You get the feeling that the search engine work has searched so many websites in a fraction of a second. You start singing praises. But truly speaking it is the hard work of the other two “invisible faces”, that it smartly brings up for your reference.
Your satisfaction gets the search engines more business which keeps them firing on all cylinders.
