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What you always wanted to know about Search Engines!

7. March 2007
Certainly you must have heard and most likely even used search engines - such as Google, Yahoo or MSN, just to name a few. There even is a strong possibility that you have found this article using one of them as about 80% first time visitors come through a search engine. So everybody is using it but do we really know what it is?

Definition for the tech savy:

On Wikipedia I found the following definition for search engines: “information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system, such as on the World Wide Web, inside a corporate or proprietary network, or in a personal computer”. Lets scale it down a bit...

The origins of search engines:

With my own words: a search engine helps us to find documents or information on a network. The World Wide Web (WWW) apparently connects around about 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 different hosts.And - there will be more. This is why computer programmes have been developed "search engines" because it is sheer impossible for any human beeing to know about all the web-addresses of the websites we are using and of course what information those websites hold.

How it works:

There is nothing magical behind these search engines. When you type a search phrase in the appropriate box, the results that you will see are web pages or web-documents that contain the word or the sentence you are searching for. But before you will get any results the search enginehas to do its homework:

Web crawling: a program browses automatically the WWW in search of new websites, documents, news or blogs
Indexing: the search engine now “reads” all the documents or web pages and generates a file (Index) holding all the existing words that at this location
Searching: when you search for a word, it will look at the Index and present all available and relevant links. There are a lot of algorithms that will sort the result by relevance (with the help of word density, popularity of the website, trust of the content…)