In this article we will learn how a Search Engine works. In this article I have just shown the basic concept and working of a Search Engine. In reality the search engines are much more complicated than this.
What is a Search Engine? Why you must use it.
Imagine that you are in a huge library. Hundreds of thousands of books surround you and you need information about a certain King who ruled Kazakhstan in the second BC. What would you do? Most probably you would ask the librarian, who then would suggest you to the history section and would inform you to search in the Kingdoms and Rulers row or the librarian would hand you over a dozen books and you will have to go on searching page by page and would take a hell of time.
Search Engine Saves your Time.
But a Web Search Engine just saves your time, energy and will give more productivity to you. But what actually a Web Search Engine is? Basically a search engine is a software program that searches websites for queries based on words that we provide to the Search Engine. The Search Engine uses certain Algorithms to provide searched results.
Generally there are two types of Search Engines.
- Crawler Based Search Engine.
- Human Powered Search Directories.
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The Crawler Based Search Engine creates their listings automatically. They “Crawl” the web. And when people search for something the search engine shows the results. And when the web pages change, the crawler based search engine eventually finds these changes and the latest changes are shown in the search.
But in the Human Powered Search Engines the websites are not crawled automatically, they are viewed, rated and then added in the Database by Humans sitting somewhere in the world. And its drawback is that each and every website cannot be indexed regularly due to huge number of websites, as some of the site might get missed in the process.
A Crawler based search engine has three major elements.
- The first element is the Spider; it is also called as the Crawler. The Spider/ Crawler visits a webpage and it reads it, and rates the site and the Spider returns to a site on a regular basis like say every few months.
- The second part of the search engine is called the Index. The Index Is also called a Catalog. An Index is like a big book containing a copy of every webpage that the Spider Crawls. If changes are made to a site that has been crawled once then the book is updated with the latest changes.
- The third part of the search engine is the Search Engine itself. The Search Engine records millions of sites in an index to find matches to a search and it also ranks websites according to the popularity, back links and relevant data.
All the Search Engines shows similar results. And all the search engines use different techniques. Using a search engine we can search vast range of topics. For each search there are approximately 1 million results. But the most relevant information is shown in the first page; this makes it easier to get quality results.
Most Search Engines today use both Crawler and the Human based search techniques. The users can rate the most useful information they found. And this helps the Search Engine to keep away a site that has no relevancy to the searched topic. This way the search engines also get to know its user preferences, like Google does.
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Lastly, “Man’s Best Friend: Dog or Google” (you decide).