adminSEARCH ENGINES
The basic function of a search engine is to respond to search query. To do this the search engine must access to a database, containing possible responses to the query. The response time, quality and accuracy of the search engines to queries are paramount consideration to the users, so attention to these metrics will go a long way in determining which search engines will dominate the user’s domain. To achieve the search goals and objectives, a lot of preplanning is necessary; this may involve gathering and prioritizing the content of the database, so that the search can proceed in an ordered and predetermined manner. This process is called indexing.
The search engine is an algorithm or software program, deploys bots or crawlers which are also programs to constantly scan the database or web as the case may be, indexing the database or websites for content and following link on each web page to other web page, gathering the necessary or desired information and returning them to the search engine main server. From here the search engines proceed to scan these growing lists of information on the database of the web archive on its main server for suitable responses to its queries. To do this the search engine considers two main areas when determining what your website is about and how to prioritize it.
The web bots or crawlers when indexing or gathering information of the pages, also tries to find out what topics the website covers, by scanning the website back end codes for these information. Also as the bots indexes they also look for links from other websites. The more inbound links a website has the more influence or authority it is perceived to have. Hence when a search query is entered, the search engine looks in its index for the most relevant information and displays it on the search engine result page, which is presented to the user to select from. This result page may differ from one search engine to another, since their search engine algorithm or programs are different and proprietary.
A few factors that a search engine algorithm or program may consider are; geographic location of the searcher, historical performance of a listing, web page content, back end code or html of web page, link type and a host of other criteria depending on the search engine set goals and objectives.
