subject: How A Search Engine Functions--Understand It And Boost Your Web Income [print this page] How A Search Engine Functions--Understand It And Boost Your Web Income
It's the search engines that in the end bring your website to the attention of the prospective customers. Therefore it's essential to know the way these search engines like Google and Yahoo actually function and how they present data to your prospects. Search Engines use crawlers to index websites.
A 'spider' or crawler' or robot' is an automatic application that visits a website, reads the content and follows the links connected to that website. The spider then fetches all that data back to the central database of the search engine. This is the place where the information is indexed. The spider will periodically go back to the sites to check for any data that has changed. The frequency with which this occurs is determined by the search engine operators. When you ask a search engine to find data by entering keywords into a search box, it's actually searching in the index of the search engine not the Web.
Different search engines like Google and Yahoo produce different rankings on their search result pages because they use different algorithms to determine which website should be ranked high or low. One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency of particular keywords on a web page, however it may possibly also stumble on synthetic key phrase stuffing or spam indexing.
Then the algorithms analyze the way in which that page is linked to other pages within the Web. If the keywords on the related pages are similar to the keywords on the original page, then the search engine can decide what this page is all about and how it should be ranked.
