You have, more likely than not, utilised the services of a search engine – probably in the very near past. Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and the myriad of others are the best way to locate information on the internet. Understanding how search engines work, and how they find the information they are displaying, is essential to your success as a webmaster.
How Search Engines Work
There’s a huge myth regarding the way the internet works. Most people believe that when you go to a search engine and type in a phrase, the search engine goes out to the internet, does a search, and brings you back the most up to date results. The real truth is that every search engine has a different method for pulling information from the internet. When you type in a search term in Google, for example, the search engine goes to its own database and brings you the most up to date information based on its’ own most recent search of the web, of which it has made a private copy.
If the search engines have not yet found or indexed a page it will not show up in your search results. This is why it is essential to customise your website from the start, ensuring that you are able to attract the attention of the search engines every time you make an update, so that they can “copy” your site into their databases.
There are three main types of search engines and each works differently. They are search engine crawlers, meta search engines, and directories.
Search Engine Crawlers
Search engine crawlers, also known as spiders or bots, are used by search engines to explore the internet and find new information. Search engines use crawlers to update their databases only a few times per month. The crawlers visit every website on the web, look for updated content, analyze the number of links on the page (and on other sites) and report back to the search engines. Google uses search engine crawlers to create a copy and index websites.
Search Engine Directories
Search engine directories, on the other hand, do not use web crawlers or spiders to index information. They instead rely on human interaction and wait for human beings to manually submit a website to the search engine’s directory of sites. The search engine usually employs an “indexer” who will manually review each submission to determine whether or not it should be listed. If so, it will be listed in the search engine’s directory of valid and useful websites. Yahoo! is a directory style search engine.
Meta Search Engines
Meta search engines use an entirely different method of searching the web. The creators of meta search engines decided that the internet is too large for any one search engine to be able to make a valid copy and, as such, all search engines provide different results. Meta search engines, like Dogpile, don’t even attempt to compile their own databases. They instead take your search term, visit the leading search engines (like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing) to see what results they rank highest, and then compile a list of sites to return to you based on the results the other search engines provided.
Every search engine has its own complicated method for determining how and when to rank every website. The information can, at times, seem a bit overwhelming. With a little professional SEO help, you will learn just how easy it is to bring your business site to the attention of a myriad of search engines.
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