What is a Search Engine?

A search engine is software that scours the Internet collecting data about every web site and every web page within a web page that it can. Each link that is encountered along the way is added to a list of pages to be scanned. This type of software has a lot of different names like a bot, a robot, a crawler or a spider. It takes all this collected data and stores it in a huge database. When you do a search on a "search engine" you are actually searching its database and not the actual Internet. Like many terms used on the Internet and computers in general this term is often misused and abused. For the sake of our discussion here we'll call the "Search Engine" the piece of software that scours the web day and night updating its database.

How Does a Search Engine Work?

Basically the search engines read pages that have been submitted to it via a submission form. From there it reads the entire page, boils it down to essential keywords and adds all the links it finds to the search list. Then it takes the next page off the list and starts all over again. You can see that just one submission to a search engine can generate thousands of pages in its database. All pages on the Internet are subject to being scanned by a search engine. If you don't want your pages to be scanned you have to take steps to prevent it. You can do this with Meta Tags or a small file named robot.txt located on your site.

How Does a Search Engine Rate a Website?

No one knows. "WHAT?!?!" I hear you thinking. "I came here to find out how a search engine works." Well the simple fact is that every search engine does things a little bit differently and the method for collecting, cataloging and rating the data that it does have changes probably on a daily base. Also the people who create these search engines would rather not tell us how it's all done. If I told you how to get your site at the top of search engines would you? Most people would say yes. Be honest now, does your site belong at the top of the search engines? Is it the best site in your category? If not, you'd be cheating the system, and that's what the creators of these search engines hope to prevent. Remember this is just software lurking around the Internet trying to determine which sites are the most relevant to any particular search query that they get at some future time. Basically what they hope to be able to come up with is a system that brings the most relevant and substantial site to the top of each query no matter what the category may be.