Understanding The Working Of A Search Engine
Understanding the working of a search engine is not indeed that complex. Having said that, a search technology in itself is very sophisticated and yes, a lot complicated to understand for the ones with limited technical knowledge. However, this should not stop us from gaining a basic overview on a search engine’s working.
The working of a search engine can be compared to that of a huge library with books on diverse subjects. Both of them have one thing in common i.e. they both deal in information. A huge resource of information is a prerequisite for both of them to work. To build on this resource, a well stocked library collects and stores books on various subjects from the publishers; a search engine, in a similar way, crawls and indexes WebPages from as much of the World Wide Web as it can. In case of a search engine, information retrieval is through search query and hence when a visitor types in “human anatomy” into the search box, the search engine returns those results that have the word ‘human anatomy’ or related references to it. The number of occurrences of such words in a web page is often referred to as keyword density.
Now once this vast information is collected, the question that comes to our mind is how to ensure that the information delivered is of highest quality. One way of validating quality in a library is to bank on the publishers’ credentials, author’s past works and also the popularity of a book which can be measured by the number of times it has written about in various other sources and media. However, the quality and relevancy of the media is important. Reference of a well known book in a news channel like BBC provides more authenticity than a reference in some channel that people hardly know of. In the context of a search engine, the quality of a web page can be measured by the domain it belongs to and the information it deals with.
The popularity of a library or a search engine is based on the quantity and quality of information resources it deals with and the ease of its accessibility. A search engine is an integration of a well equipped library with world class automated data management and information retrieval technologies, powerful enough to give us what we are looking for within seconds. No wonder the buzz around search engine optimization is reaching phenomenal levels each day!
Tags: Search Engine, Search Technologies, SEO