VIDEO – Understanding How Search Engines Work

According to Wikipedia, Google Search or Google Web Search is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. and is the most-used search engine on the Web Google receives several hundred million queries each day through its various services. The main purpose of Google Search is to hunt for text in webpages, as opposed to other data, such as with Google Image Search. Google search was originally developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997.
Google Search provides more than 22 special features beyond the original word-search capability. These include synonyms, weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps, earthquake data, movie showtimes, airports, home listings, and sports scores.

You need to have a basic understanding of the ins and outs of optimizing a blog for the Search Engines, if you want to grasp how search engines work. Search the essence of the Internet. Google has come to stay because of this. It is the first URL we type in our browsers when we need to look for anything online – type a keyword, and voila, thousands of websites pop out. It never ceases to amaze me.

So how does the Google select which sites to display when you search for something?

Recently, I discovered this excellent video by the face of Google – Matt Cutts, himself. Matt heads the webspam team and if you’re really serious about SEO, he is the man to know and obey.
So enjoy the video
How Search Engines Work

The Summary of Matt’s Points:
• Web pages are indexed by Google throughout the internet by their software programs called “spiders”. They tore all these pages in their servers.
• Once a search term is entered at Google, their software finds the indexed webpages for every page including the search term.
• Google decides the documents that are really relevant through several criteria:
- how many times the search term/keyword appears on the page
- does the word appear in the title, in the URL
- does the page include synonyms for those keywords
- Is the page from a quality website or is it low quality, even spamming
- What is the page’s PageRank
• All these criteria are combined together by Google to generate an overall score and send back the search results on the result page.

The video shows how Google works, but the process is the same for other search engines like Yahoo, Bing, Ask Jeeves etc. The difference lies in the mathematical algorithm used for producing the overall score and rating the relevance of a webpage – though it is not uncommon to rank well in Google and yet be invisible on Yahoo and vice versa.

Now we have a basic foundation of how a search engine works and are ready to learn how to make our blogs produce a high score for our keywords.