I want to know how a Search Engine Works !

General Disclaimer - Happy Online would like to remind all visitors that they are responsible for their own computer settings - some suggestions may not work on some computers and may result in errors - you should only make changes to your computer if you are comfortable with any consequences that may arise.

Different Search Engines work in different ways, but hopefully the below outline will provide the very basics on how most of the Search Engines work.

Firstly, the Search Engine needs to build up a database of Web Pages, this is achieved by a spider (sometimes called Robot - Spider does not mean the eight legged insect.) crawling the Web for data. The Spider will basically visit pages that it knows exists and add or update these to the database, new pages are found by the spider by being submitted to the Search Engine or by the Spider following links from existing pages to the new pages.

The Search Engine will then probably compress this data to improve speed for when the Search is performed.

When a Search is performed the Database will be queried and results will be returned to the user. Search Engines have differing methods of ranking which results are relevant to the Search, among the factors considered are:-

• Number of Occurences of the Search Term on the Page.
• The Terms Used in the Title of the Page.
• The Terms Used in Meta Tags in the Coding of the Page.
• What Format the Search Terms are displayed in on the Page.
• Number of Links Pointing Towards the Page.
• The Quality of the Link Pointing Towards the Page.
• The Terms Used in the Links Pointing Towards the Page.

The above is only a small selection of the ranking criteria some search engines use (some of the above criteria are not used by all Search Engines), it is believed that for the major search engines there are over 100 different ranking criterias.

Ask you own question

This Service has been removed.