understanding search engines

Google, and nearly all of the other mainstream search engines, work in just the way you would imagine (if you ever stopped to think about it) — they crawl around the net, following the web page links as they find them from one page to the next, and index everything that they find in a huge online database.

Then, when a user enters a phrase into the search page, they look up the words in this index, finds those that match, and then sort these entries into what they think is the best order.

And this order is critical. There may be thousands (even millions) of matches in the search results and Google, for example, will only show 10 results per page. Since very few people ever look beyond page two only the first 20 matches matter — and the first five are by far the most important. The rest will probably be ignored.

So how do the likes of Google decide what gets shown at the top of the results list?

For a detailed look at how search engines work click here to download our guide (in PDF format)...