Understanding Search Engines
It is imperative for us to understand the process that runs behind Search Engines before implementing various Search Engine Optimization strategies.
It is always better to at least know how search engines have evolved, the processes involved and its various components. And, above all how it answers a users’ queries.
Although its not relevant to any of the search engine methodology, it could be useful for those who intend to connect the dots of a SEO techniques puzzle. Understand the above with the help of an example, we purchase a car, and we get a service booklet that mentions all the necessary steps to be undertaken for smooth functioning of our vehicle.
And, if understand the mechanics behind our vehicle well then the experience can help with smooth functioning of our vehicle. Similarly, if we understand processes involved behind Search Engines well, then we would be in better position to take necessary steps while implementing search engine optimization techniques.
We consider search engine as a tool through which we resolve our queries on the web. How search engine does that – it simply analyses our search queries and searches the web for us and returns with the most relevant links to website available. The web pages where the results are displayed are called Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). The information or the result of our search could be of any type depending on our request. That could be in the form of images, videos, articles, research papers, books, journals etc.
The next question that comes to our head is, how search engines return with an answer to our queries? That is possible with the help of crawlers. Crawlers searches the web and index a websites’ content. This make search engines return with the results efficiently. A crawler is also known as a spider.
Archie is considered to be the first search engine. Launched on September 10, 1990 – Archie was mainly a tool used for indexing FTP archives. Thereafter, there were a series of search engines launches, and the most prominent one, back in the time, was AltaVista launched in the year 1995. Next, it was Google that launched in the year 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were its founders. Initially, they nicknamed their search engine “Backrub” because it ranked pages on the basis of number of back-links. Later, Yahoo acquired AltaVista and came up with its own search engine. Microsoft too came to fore and developed its MSN search in the year 1999, it is now known as Bing.
As of now, Google has been topping the charts when it comes to market share and it is the most-sought after search engine.
Till now, we have had a brief understanding of a search engine. Next, we cover the processes involved inside a search engine.
