What Is a Search Engine?
Although this question seems incredibly elementary, I’m often surprised by the amount of people I come across who don’t know the difference between a search engine and a browser.
A search engine is an online entity that provides a list of the websites that are relevant to key words or phrases that users search for. Google, Yahoo and Bing (formerly MSN) are the three most popular Search Engines.
A browser, by the way, is the portal through which users can access the internet. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Safari are the three most popular browsers.
How do Search Engines Work?
Search Engines operate by indexing all of the web sites on the internet. They accomplish this monumental task by deploying automated programs called Robots or Spiders to crawl through websites and index the data on those websites.
Once these pages are indexed, they are stored away for future reference in databases. When a user types in a search query, the search engine runs through all of the pages in its data base and uses a proprietary algorithm to decide which of the billions of pages stored in the database are the most relevant to the keywords in the search query. The algorithm further sorts the pages into a list ordered by relevance, and serves that list to the searcher.
The Search Engine Algorithms
Each Search Engine has their own proprietary algorithm that they use to decide which pages are the most relevant to the terms users searched for. They take hundreds of aspects of the webpage into consdieration, and not all these aspects carry the same weight.
The search engines keep their algorithm a secret to keep people from falsely promoting their site. A lot of the research that Search Engine Optimizers do involves reverse engineering the algorithms to figure out how to rank websites higher.
The search engines do release tips and best practice guidelines designed to help the web masters learn how to make their sites compliant and friendly so as to attract attention and promote indexing.
Search Engine Priorities
The search engines have only one priority: getting the best and most relevant results for the user. As long as webmasters keep this firmly in mind, much confusion as to why the do what they do will be eliminated. Search engine optimization ideally helps you make your site the most powerful and relevant.
There are many who game the system and create false relevance. This is risky and will likely end up with sites getting banned, especially in a highly competitive industry.
As long as the end goal is to make a site exactly what the search engines want to see in order to get ranked highly, the risk of punishment is small.
