In our previous blog posts, we’ve been talking about SEO, SEO ranking, and Quality Content. But we forgot to explain how the search engine operates, and this brings us to this post. Bevenny Creations is going to give you a brief history of search engines, how they work, and why do we need them.
History of the search engine
It all started back in 1990 with Archie Query Form, and I don’t know if any of you young folks know about this. But anyway, Archie searched FTP sites to create an index of downloadable files. Since they had limited storage space, they only listed downloadable files and not the content of each site.
A few other search engines followed after-suit, from the year of 1991 to 1994 when Yahoo Search was introduced to the world. Then in 1998, we had MSN search and Google entering the search engines race for dominance. Even today, there are still new search engines entering the competition. But at the moment, Google has ranked number one is most parts of the world.
I guess you are still wondering what the hell is a search engine, and why is it so damn important? Don’t worry, cause we are going to answer all these and more questions for you.
What is a search engine
They are programs that search documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. A search engine is a general class of programs; however, the term is often used to describe systems like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Search that enables users to search for documents on the World Wide Web.
To make this a bit easier for you to understand, let’s use the yellow pages as an example of the search engine. Yellow Pages index all telephone directories of businesses and people. It was the best search engine you could think about in 1883 until the web search engine took over. So now, you can understand that search engines index content of the internet, making them easier to find.
How does it work
It works by sending out a spider to fetch as many documents as possible. Another program called an indexer then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query.
The term spider means a web crawler. Web crawler visits a web page; it makes a copy of it and adds its URL to an index. Once this is done, the web crawler follows all the links on the page, repeating the process of copying, indexing, and then following the links. It keeps doing this, building up a massive index of many web pages as it goes.
How do they rank pages
Page ranking is the best-known algorithm that is used to improve web search results. In simple terms, page ranking is a popularity contest. The more links that point to a web page, the more useful it will seem. This means it will appear higher up in the results.
The web pages on the first page of search results are those that ranking algorithm thinks are the best. But that isn’t all, because they also pay attention to lots of other ‘signals’ when working out the order to show you results. For example, how often the page is updated and if it is from a trustworthy domain.
There are many search engines to choose from. Different search engines use different algorithms. This means that some sites will give their results in a different order, or they may even show completely different results altogether.
Why do we need them
They are handy for conducting researches, looking for help, or even business information. Let’s just say; they are essential for knowledge management. Also, many website owners rely on search engines to send traffic to their website, and the entire industry has grown around the idea of optimizing Web content to improve your placement in search engine results.
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