Search Engines

A search engine is like an online version of the yellow pages and is a major part of your business website success (it is possible to be successful without search engines by using viral marketing and other methods but for the time, cost and effort, they usually proportionally yield more fruit). Internet users will go to one of many search engines such as www.google.com. At the time of writing, Google is the search engine of choice within the Internet community and therefore the one most business website owners concentrate on ranking well in.

Search Engine Technology

Search engines work by sending out pieces of software called spiders. These visit websites, make a copy of what they find and send it back to a central database (for those not in the know, a database is a logical method of storing large amounts of data that can be searched easily and quickly). These work 24/7 and most search engines have their own “spiders”. The spiders missions is to collect as much information about as many websites as possible and send it back. With new sites being added to the Internet every day and old ones being changed, this is a never-ending task.

Around every month or so, search engines will reorganise their database to take account of discontinued websites, new ones added and existing ones changed. This is why when you enter a search term into a search engine, the results returned can be vastly different from month to month. What was listed at the top of page 1 for a key phrase last month is now relegated to page 5 for the same phrase. With Google, this is affectionately known as the “Google shuffle” although the technical term is re-indexing.

This keeps the returned results current and accurate. Search engines spend a lot of time and money on getting this right as the more accurate a search engine is at returning the information requested the more people would use it. This is how Goggle has become the market leader in the search engine market because their results are usually very accurate and they provide many useful tools in narrowing down large searches.