What Are Search Engines And How Do They Work?

Many of you probably use a search engine such as google every single day, but do you know how one actual works? Do you know why all those results appear or what sponsored ads are? You would be surprised how many people don't know the process or the inner workings of search engines! Some parts are pretty confusing and others not so much, maybe that's because I have owned a search engine so I had to learn how it worked! Of course there are the big boy SEs like Google, Yahoo and MSN but there are also search engines that are medium and smaller ones referred to as PPC engines. For medium ones I would probably name off ones like Dog Pile or Alta Vista, for small PPC ones I would say Smart-Phart or Gold Searching.

If you delve down a little deeper there are also search engines referred to as Meta Crawlers, these search engines allow you to use one engine to search on multiple sites. Mamma is a good example. Every time you type in a query at a meta-search engine, they search a series of other search sites at the same time, compile their results, and display them either by search engine employed or by integrating them in a uniform manner, eliminating duplicates, and resorting them according to relevance. It's like using multiple search engines, all at the same time but much quicker!

In general I think we already know how search engines work, you look for something, put in the keyword phrase, and the results show up. But where do all those results come from? Crawler-based search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. They "crawl" or "spider" the web, then people search through what they have found. You literally can search for anything and it will be found. You can ask the engine questions, you can put in products/brands, you can say keywords, you can enter in store names, people's names, anything and you will find a result.

The sponsored results you see for example, on the top and side of Google are bought ads. People can go to sites like AdWords and buy space on space to place their ads, these ads are almost always relevant to what the results are that you are searching for but once in a blue moon I'll be searching for tennis and a golf ball sponsor ad will show up. It happens, not a huge deal! Usually the people that buy the ads on the side and the sponsor ads will place a certain amount of money in their account on AdWords, and then they can say okay I want my ad to be .10 cents, if you have $100 in the account that's about 1000 clicks.

Usually when you allocate an ad and give it a high worth, its placed more on the engine. In other words you could search flowers once, and then search flowers again and the same ads probably won't show up, if they do, then that person probably paid a good amount of money for it to do that.

There really is no default engine for everyone to use, people just find a search engine they like and they go with it, usually sticking with it and never changing. So, that's why new engines need a nice little "hook" to reel you in. If you are super dedicated to using Google, you won't move on and use another site unless it has something really special about it right? Well this is one of the reasons there are so many engines, each one is trying to out do the next, and each one is trying to get more visitors than the other. I have a few faves I use besides Google, one of which is a site called Find.

Find is a terrific engine where you cannot only just search but you can also find out information about certain subject. For example, if we go to Food, we will see a few extra subcategories to choose from such as Gourmet, Food Network, Easy Recipes, Cooking Light or Halloween Recipes. Now if you click easy recipes you will be given a little summary of what easy recipes are, how they are used, why should you use easy recipe. But as said above you can also use this as a search engine, by placing whatever you are looking for in the search box and pressing "find". Pretty cool! Check it out!

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