subject: Search Engine - How does it work? [print this page] Search Engine - How does it work? Search Engine - How does it work?
Best part of internet usage is the value added services that are effective, efficient, quick and stored at World Wide Web search engines. Several search engines like Google are commendable, for being prime source of information and that too free. Understand search engine may seem difficult. However, to understand search engines is simple.
Understanding search engine
A search engine is a program, which searches for documents across the web for fed specified keywords and returns with a list of results. Though search engine is general class, it is often used to describe various systems like Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista and Bing that allow the users to search over the World Wide Web and newsgroups.
How does it work?
Search engines works in a way by sending out spider to crawl the web to find as many documents matching the keyword. Yet another program, indexer, later reads all fetched documents and creates index depending on keywords included in every document. Every search engine has its own unique propriety algorithm to create the index of results for every query.
Major search engines like Google, AltaVista and Yahoo index result of large portion of World Wide Web and offers results distributed over pages. The sp ecialized type content search engines are quite selective about which part of Web is indexed. There are some special tools and major websites like everycorners.com that allow you to use several search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Alta Vista and Ask.com at the very same time and compile all results for you in one single list. Alternatively, there are several portals over the web that offers similar finding approaches that of directories and search engines. You can also submit or search here for Online Forums, Videos and Directories.
Searching at Search Engines
Searching at these search engines is quite easy with the choice of options we have today, more than 370 search engines. While searching for specific information, you may search at specialized search engines (if any known). In case, there isn't specialized search engine that you know of then simply try big search engines like Google or Yahoo and you will certainly find document matching your subject. Ideally, you should be able to locate the piece of information that you were looking for within the first 20 search results. In case you are unable to locate definite subject-related information, you can use subject directories and narrow your search. If required, you may opt to search at the newsgroups, forums and web.