Search Engines

Search Engine is a program. The program basically searches documents for a certain phrase, term or word and gives us a list of the places or documents where that word or phrase was found. Although there are many such programs that perform such a search function, "Search Engine" has come to mean certain specific programs like Google, Yahoo Search, Alta Vista etc that help users search the internet for information and documents.

How do Search Engines Work?
Simply put, the search engine has small robots programs that run without any human guidance which scan all the material they can find on the internet. The robot is called a spider. This spider gets all information to another program that automatically studies and indexes the documents, based on the search word. All the relevant documents are thus listed and produced for the viewer.
Search engines are very useful. The internet is vast and a person might get bewildered trying to find the information needed. If there were no search engines, it would simply not have been possible to find the information one needs without knowing the website’s specific url.

There are basically 3 types of search engines

• Those that run on robots (crawlers, spiders, ants)
• Those that have human submissions
• A mix or combination of both

Spiders automatically visit a web site, read the information, read the meta tags, follow links etc and bring it back for tabulating and indexing. It periodically returns and updates the information.

Search engines that rely on humans actually use people to submit information which is then tabulated and catalogued. Only information that is submitted is indexed.

So when you type in subject that you are searching for, you are actually accessing data that has already been tabulated by the search engine and you are not hunting the entire internet yourself. Sometimes you get broken links or a page does not load up. It is because the information gathered by the robots, or the human submissions has not been updated in the index.

Key words have to be placed well in the content of a web page for it to get indexed by the search engines. Search engines are mostly automated and they base their search on the number of times the relevant key word appears in the content. If it appears infrequently, the spiders may just decide that this page is not so relevant. If the content appears saturated in the key word which presents its own problems.


These days when SEO is becoming a big thing for internet marketing, web masters are becoming more aware of how search engines work. Since indexing of a page is extremely dependent on the frequency with which a key word appears on the page, web masters are stuffing the page with relevant key words. The term is known as spamdexing.

On the other hand search engines are also getting sophisticated and learning how to ignore spamdexing. The trick is to saturate content with just about 2% of the key word so that it does not get ignored and stays in the indexes of commercial and popular search engines like Google and Yahoo!

Sam Roberts is the owner and CEO of remove junk files and erase junk files and delete junk files software tools