How Basically Search Engines Work

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With the rapid growth of the World Wide Web, searching has occupy most of the internet user’s time. It’s like searching for a good book from one big library. To solve this problem we need a system that can help us to find what we are actually looking for. This system is called search engine.

The search engine that I will focus on this page is Google. The other search engines would work relatively different compare to Google but in my opinion it’s more important to know how Google works. There are lots of search engines that offer different capabilities to help you grow your online business but why do I choose Google? It’s because at the moment Google is “hot shot” and more people are using Google compare to the other search engines but don’t refrain yourself from submitting your website to the other search engines. If at this moment you’re trying to improve your rank with Google, you’re indirectly doing the right thing to improve your ranking with the other search engines too.

Through Google people could search each and every page of all the websites which could develop into millions or billions of different documents and informations. This is because when you search through Google, all the pages on those websites are searched by you. To be successful in online business, you should think more like a customer who is looking for information from the World Wide Web.

A classic way to search in any searh engine is to type in a word or two but this will give you lots of results. Once again you have to spend more time to search for the information that you actually need. Let say for example if you type in generate side income in the Google searh and the results are 15.1 million pages but with a better approach you type in how to generate side income for beginner and this narrow down to 374,000 matches.

The rank order in Google search is from the most relevant to the least. The ranking is also influenced not just by words and patterns but also the order on how they appear in the search. You can verify this by typing “how to generate side income for beginner” and “how beginner generate side income”. The first will generates 374,000 while the second generates 485,000. Google uses PageRank formula to measure the importance of a website and also the pages within the website.

Consider PageRank as a popularity vote based on the importance of the other website that points to your website. The more number of website that point to your website, the more valuable your website would be. PageRank has nothing to do with any relevant keywords or searches. Hence to increase your PageRank you have to get more link to your website. PageRank calcultion are shown with Google Toolbar that indicates the importance of the given website to the whole internet users. You can download the Google Toolbar from here.

The scale of the PageRank is from 1 to 10 whereby a PageRank of zero means that the page isn’t in the Google database. PageRank of 1 to 4 are judged as unimportant, 5 to 7 are websites with strong contents and 8 to 10 are considered as the top websites on the internet. High PageRank websites will also frequently visited by Google compare to the low PageRank websites.

Apart from the PageRank, spidering is the other method for the search engines to find updated web pages from the internet. Spiders work by building a list of other web pages and cross checked them against a database of known web pages in order to eliminate duplicates. Google has Googlebot for the spidering method. If a web page change frequently, Googlebot will frequently visit the web page too. This is one of the reason why a lot of people have blog on their website.

A website will also be ranked higher because of the structure and the content in the website itself. If a word or phrase is mentioned in the web page and it’s also positioned on the word or phrase in the design page, the relevence score will also be higher. For example if how to generate side income for beginner is a web page title and has generate side income mentioned many times in the web page, this will generate high relevence score for generate side income.

Actually it is not really known how search engines measure exactly from billions of known web pages are expected to be the best matched for a given query but a Google-friendly websites will likely to be more accurately and easily analyzed and ranked by the other searh engines especially Yahoo! and MSN.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 10:54 am and is filed under SEO, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.