How Search Engines Work

Picture the World Wide Web to be a connected series of stops in a large city subway system.

It is the work of the search engines to “crawl” all stops in the city. The stops are different unique documents that are often webpages, but sometimes PDFs, images, or other file types. To be able to crawl the whole city, search engines use the best route they can find links.

Crawling and Indexing

Crawling and indexing all of the numerous documents, files, news, pages, media, and videos on the World Wide Web.

Supplying Answers

Supplying answers to queries of users by listing relevant pages that they have gathered and ranked on the basis of their relevance.

The link structure of the web functions to connect all of the web pages.
Links make it possible for “crawlers” or “spiders” (automated robots of search engines) to access billions of documents that are interconnected on the web.

Immediately the pages are found by search engines and from there decoded, and then some chosen parts of them are stored in massive databases where they are easily recalled anytime they are needed for a search query. To execute the difficult operation of storing numerous pages that can be reached in a few seconds, companies operating search engines have built data centers across the world.

These huge storage facilities house a great number of machines that process information quickly. When you search for anything, you want results fast. Anything less disrupts your experience. That’s why search engines have been programmed to process and supply results within seconds.

Search engines are answer machines. When you search anything online, the search engines quickly flip through their series of stored documents and other file types and then do two things: supply only results they consider relevant to your search queries, and, present the results in a ranked format with the ranking on the basis of how popular the websites providing the information are. SEO is therefore used to gain more relevance and popularity. These factors make up efficient, conversion-driven, successful internet marketing.
How is popularity and relevance judged by search engines?

Good internet marketing is often the result of a good ranking by search engines. Relevance to a search engine does not only mean finding the right words on a page. That was during the early days of the web. Back then, search engines only checked for the right words on a page, but this caused the results provided to be of limited value, Today, web gurus have found better techniques of matching results to queries. In this current age of the web, a lot of factors can influence relevance, and we will explain all the important factors in this guide.

Search engines operate under the belief that the more popular a site, document, or page is, the more valuable the information it houses would be. The assumption is fair, judging from the satisfaction of users with search results.

The process of judging relevance and popularity is not manual. The search engines use algorithms (mathematical equations) to separate the crops from the weed (relevance), and to rank the crops on the basis of their quality (popularity).

Often, these mathematical equations incorporate hundreds of variables which are called “ranking factors.”

In this example, you can deduce that according to search engines, the most popular and relevant page for the search “universities” is Ohio state’s while Harvard’s is less popular/relevant.

To get an improved ranking in their search engine, Google recommends the following:

• Make pages primarily user- friendly, not search engine-friendly. Never attempt to deceive your users or display to search engines a different content from what you displayed to users, a practice called “cloaking.”
• Make a site with a distinct ordering and text links. All pages should be accessible from at least a static text link.
• Create a useful site that has enough information, unambiguously and perfectly describe your content. Ensure that your <title> elements and ALT features are perfect and descriptiveCreate a useful site that has enough information to, and write pages that unambiguously and perfectly describe your content. Ensure that your
• With keywords, create URLs that are descriptive and user-friendly. Supply one version of a URL to access a document and use 301 redirects or the rel=”canonical” feature to address contents that are duplicate.

As an addition to this advice freely given, after trying different options throughout the 15+ years of search engine existence, search marketers have discovered some cool ways to get details about how search engines rank pages. SEO experts and marketers use the details they have to increase the ranking of their sites and also their clients.

As a surprise, the search engines are found to be in support of the efforts, although there is often a very low public visibility. Representatives and engineers from all the big engines today are attracted by search marketing conferences like Search Engine Strategies,  Search Marketing Expo, Distilled, Pubcon, etc. Representatives of search engines also help webmasters by joining some online forums, groups, or participating in blogs.

We started our test with an assumption, the hypothesis, that a link ranked higher carries better weight than one lower. We experimented this by creating a ludicrous domain that has a homepage with links to three other pages that have a nonsense word appearing once on each page. After the search engines generated results, we discovered the page that has the link at the earliest position ranked first.

Although this is a very informative step, it is not all that a search marketer has to know.

To add more knowledge to the one from this type of testing, great competitive intelligence can also be gleaned by search marketers when they study how search engines work through patent applications made by the big search engines to the United States Patent Office. The most popular among these would likely be the system that enhanced the rise of Google in the Stanford dormitories around the late 1990s, called PageRank, and documented as Patent #6285999: A paper on the subject –Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine­–is also very important for extra study. However, no qualms, you don’t have to go take remedial calculus just to understand SEO.

By using methods such as experiments, patent analysis, live testing, etc., the community of search marketers have discovered certain core operations of search engines and the important components of developing websites and setting up pages that will rank high and drive great traffic.

All these ways would be explained comprehensively in the rest of this guide. Stay glued!