What is a Search Engine and How do they Work?
Before we even start unravelling the science behind Search Engine Optimisation, it important to understand what search engines are and how do they work. Now the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of the search engines is probably Google, and quite rightly so as Google generates over 90% of the world’s searches. But it is important to remember that search engines are not limited to just Google but also includes names such as Yahoo!, Bing, AOL, Ask etc.
We would recommend that your SEO efforts are focused at Google, Yahoo! and Bing as these are the 3 major search engines out there.
According to the latest research published by www.kozai.com,
What is a Search Engine?
Search Engine is a software program that searches the Internet (websites and pages) based on the words that you designate as search terms. Search engines look through their own databases of information in order to find what it is that a user is looking for.
The information collected is usually key words or phrases that are possible indicators of what is contained on the web page as a whole, the URL of the page, the code that makes up the page, and links into and out of the page. That information is then indexed and stored in a database.
How do Search Engines Work?
By now you must have realised that the search engines are not humans and there are fundamental differences between how humans and search engines view web sites and pages. Search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.
It is important to remember that every search engine has its own formula and it is a closely guarded secret.
This is the reason why one can never claim to have guaranteed No. 1 search engine results!
Types of Search Engines & Differences
Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between them lead to major changes in results relevancy. For different search engines different factors are important. The major search engines like different stuff and if you plan to conquer more than one of them, you need to optimise carefully.
Search engines can be broken down into three different types: primary, secondary, and targeted.