For most people, all they really need to know about a search engine is that it’s where they go to find the information they want quickly and clearly.  They don’t think much about the whats, hows or whys that get them that information.  But those who take apart toasters to see how they work might find what’s going on inside the machine pretty interesting. 

Search engines are definitely not simple – the Google algorithm alone has over 500 million variables and 2 billion terms that are analyzed in order to determine which answers to give and where to place them in the results.  Google doesn’t disclose much more than that.

To put it into the simplest terms, a search engine is a software program that takes a keyword or phrase that a searcher types in and scours the Internet to find you the information/products/services it thinks you’re looking for.  The thorny part is understanding the methodologies and detailed processes that go into how it decides what to serve up.  Not only do the search engines have to know which pages to pick, there’s even the issue of preventing them from indexing pages that are to be kept confidential.

Here’s a simplified glossary of basic terms to help you understand what is a search engine and how does it work:

• Algorithm: A complex series of rules used by search engines to determine where a page will show up in the results
• HTML:  Stands for hypertext markup language; a set of tags and codes that make up the computer language used on Web pages  
• Indexing:  When a search engine adds a URL to the millions of pages in its website database
• Keywords: Single words or strings of words that are typed into the search box 
• Meta tags:  Page code that tells the search engine what a page is about
• Query:  The process of entering the keywords into the search box and receiving results 
• Robots.txt:  A file a webmaster sets up that that tells the spider which pages to include or restrict in the index
• Search box:  Blank field where searcher enters words that represent the subject he/she wishes to find out about
• Spider/Web crawler/robot:  An automated Web browser that follows every link on a site

In essence, a user types a query into a search box using keywords.  In a matter of seconds, the search engine interprets the user’s intentions and, using a complicated algorithm, returns from hundreds to millions of results from its index that it deems relevant. In that flash of time, the search engine’s spider follows the rules dictated by robots.txt files, reads the Meta tags, interprets the HTML coding, crawls the World Wide Web and delivers its results in a neat package custom tailored to the user’s query.

Let us help you understand the world of search engines and help you find your website among their top results. Give us a call today at 1-888-667-1791.