1. a crawler



2. an index

3. and a search interface

Let's look at each part individually to get a better understanding of them. Each part has its own role to play in the process, with all parts working together to make searches possiple.

1. The Crawler:

Also known as a "spider" or "bot", this part of the search engine wanders the web, following links and picking up information for its database. Crawlers do most of their work at times of the day when searh engines are less busy, but they typically visit frequently updated pages more often. This is something to keep in mind when you are working on your pages.

Your site's title and text(your content) are the most important thing to a crawler. The fastest way to raise your site's search engine ranking for specific key words is to implement them into your title and your content.

2. The index.

Once the crawler has collected all that text, it is then stored and indexed. This allows people searching for key words and phrases to get results relating to what they were searching for - their search results. Most sites will incorporate rating systems such as Google Page Rank or Alexa Rankings in positioning your site. These ratings are used attempt to ensure that sites that are important receive more traffic than unimportant sites.

To see this in action, go to a search engine and type in a word. You'll see some text on the page saying something like "results 1-10 of 1,234,000". This means that the search engine's index contains 1,234,000 pages it believes are related to the word you typed. If you wanted to, you could look through all these pages to find the information you're looking for.

In order to understand rating systems more thoroughly consider your own site. When you place links on your site you generally do so to increase your users understanding of the content of your site.

If every site in a particular field links to a particular site, this site is probably very important to that field and should, therefore, be listed highly in the lists of search engine results. This is the basic ideology of Google Page Ranks.

Consider again, a site that receives a great deal of traffic, it probably has some information or service that is very important to its users. Alexa ratings attempt to estimate the amount of traffic that a particular site gets and compare it to the amount of traffic that other sites get. The closer that a site is to the most trafficed site on the internet, the more likely it is to have important content if it is relevant to search query.

3. The Interface.

Search engines provide a public intrface for users who want to find information on the web. They can type the word or phrase they're searching for, and the interface will run an algorithm to find the pages relevant to their search and display them.

These algorithms are an important part of the SEO(Search Engine Optimization) business. You'll notice when the algorithms change, the rankings of your website will change with them. No two search engines have the same algorithms. They all work differently, with their unique features, and they will all respond to your website in their own way.

The most popular search engines today include Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alltheweb, and AskJeeves.

Hassan Sarsour

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