subject: Search Engine [print this page] Search Engine Search Engine
Elements of search engine:
We can classify search engines into two categories such as
Spider based search engines
Human powered directories
Generally in spider based search engines web spiders scan the entire webpages and index it and list it in search engine. Fig below represents the spider based search engine.
Anatomy of search engines:
Any search engine has three important components such as Spider/ Crawler, Index and search engine software.
Spider: As we discussed earlier it scans the webpage.
Index. Once scanning done those data has to be forwarded to the database. The index contains a copy of each web pages scanned by the crawler.
Search Engine: Search Engines searches the entire database i.e. indexed pages and matches it with the user query. This is generally referred as Indexing.
Interesting, so how does a search engine rank a particular page?
Ranking is done by a program called Search Engine Algorithm. No one knows the algorithm though :) Ranking is based on two factors
On-page factors: keyword targeting, HTML tags, Content, URL
Off-page factors:Link Building, Link Popularity
Can I spam a search engine to increase page rank?
You can if you wish to be penalized by Google and other major search engines. Google hates spammers and it is an unethical practice for optimizing the site. There are several spam tactics are cloaking, Keyword stuffing, Doorway pages, URL redirects, Hidden text etc. Since I hate spam I do not wish to get into this topic further.
