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What is a search engine? Good question. Well, a search engine is basically a program that looks for information on the internet and organises it according to a set of rules to give this information to you in logical order. Search engines are constantly looking at the world wide web for content and other information. They log this information and revisit new and old sites at regular intervals to update their information. You type in what you're looking for, and the search engine tries to match it. Simple really. Read on below for more details.
Nelson Kruschandl - "Search tools are fab"
A search engine is a program designed to help find information stored on a computer system such as the World Wide Web, or a personal computer. The search engine allows one to ask for content meeting specific criteria (typically those containing a given word or phrase) and retrieves a list of references that match those criteria. Search engines use regularly updated indexes to operate quickly and efficiently. Without further qualification, search engine usually refers to a Web search engine, which searches for information on the public Web. Other kinds of search engine are enterprise search engines, which search on intranets, personal search engines, which search individual personal computers, and mobile search engines.
Some search engines also mine data available in newsgroups, large databases, or open directories like DMOZ.org. Unlike Web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines operate algorithmically. Most web sites which call themselves search engines are actually front ends to search engines owned by other companies.
Around 2001, the Google search engine rose to prominence. Its success was based in part on the concept of link popularity and 'Page Rank'. How many other web sites and web pages link to a given page is taken into consideration with Page Rank, on the premise that good or desirable pages are linked to more than others. The PageRank of linking pages and the number of links on these pages contribute to the Page Rank of the linked page. This makes it possible for Google to order its results by how many web sites link to each found page. Google's minimalist user interface was very popular with users, and has since spawned a number of imitators.
Google and most other web engines utilize not only PageRank but more than 150 criteria to determine relevancy. The algorithm "remembers" where it has been and indexes the number of cross-links and relates these into groupings. PageRank is based on citation analysis that was developed in the 1950s by Eugene Garfield at the University of Pennsylvania. Google's founders cite Garfield's work in their original paper. In this way virtual communities of webpages are found. Teoma's search technology uses a communities approach in its ranking algorithm. NEC Research Institute has worked on similar technology. Web link analysis was first developed by Dr. Jon Kleinberg and his team while working on the CLEVER project at IBM's Almaden research lab. Google is currently the most popular search engine.
Yahoo! Search
In 2002, Yahoo! acquired Inktomi and in 2003, Yahoo! acquired Overture, which owned AlltheWeb and AltaVista. Despite owning its own search engine, Yahoo initially kept using Google to provide its users with search results on its main web site Yahoo.com. However, in 2004, Yahoo! launched its own search engine based on the combined technologies of its acquisitions and providing a service that gave pre-eminence to the Web search engine over the directory.
Microsoft
The most recent major search engine is MSN Search, owned by Microsoft, which previously relied on others for its search engine listings. In 2004 it debuted a beta version of its own results, powered by its own web crawler (called msnbot). In early 2005 it started showing its own results live. This was barely noticed by average users unaware of where results come from, but was a huge development for many webmasters, who seek inclusion in the major search engines.
At the same time, Microsoft ceased using results from Inktomi, now owned by Yahoo. This meant the market was now dominated by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. The other large (self described) search engines tend to be "portals" that merely show the results another company's search engine (like MSN Search used to do). The other "true" search engines (those that provide their own results), like Gigablast, have vastly less market presence than the big three. However, since site usage is proprietary information, it's often difficult to determine which sites are most popular.
Challenges faced by search engines
How search engines work
A search engine operates, in the following order
Web search engines work by storing information about a large number of web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated web browser which follows every link it sees, exclusions can be made by the use of robots.txt.
The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed (for example, words are extracted from the titles, headings, or special fields called meta tags). Data about web pages is stored in an index database for use in later queries. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages, whereas some store every word of every page it finds, such as AltaVista. This cached page always holds the actual search text since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very useful when the content of the current page has been updated and the search terms are no longer in it.
This problem might be considered to be a mild form of linkrot, and Google's handling of it increases usability by satisfying user expectations that the search terms will be on the returned web page. This satisfies the principle of least astonishment since the user normally expects the search terms to be on the returned pages. Increased search relevance makes these cached pages very useful, even beyond the fact that they may contain data that may no longer be available elsewhere.
When a user comes to the search engine and makes a query, typically by giving key words, the engine looks up the index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document's title and sometimes parts of the text. Most search engines support the use of the boolean terms AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. An advanced feature is proximity search, which allows you to define the distance between keywords.
The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the results it gives back. While there may be millions of Web pages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the "best" results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another. The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes and new techniques evolve.
Most web search engines are commercial ventures supported by advertising revenue and, as a result, some employ the controversial practice of allowing advertisers to pay money to have their listings ranked higher in search results.
The vast majority of search engines are run by private companies using proprietary algorithms and closed databases, the most popular currently being Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo! Search. However, Open source search engine technology does exist, such as ht://Dig, Nutch, Senas, Egothor, OpenFTS, DataparkSearch and many others.
Storage costs and crawling time
A modern search engine can operate with stunningly modest storage requirements. Assuming a 500GB drive costs $100 USD (2006 prices), and that an average web page compresses to less than 10K, 10B pages would compress to 100TB, thus using 200 hard drives and cost around $20K. If kept 4 drives per server, we would need no more than 50 servers to store these 10B pages, which at $250/computer would cost under $12.5K. Thus it is possible to have 10B pages held on a server farm with no more than $25K of hardware. Most search engines, in order to serve millions of search queries, serve ads and process the crawl have considerably more resources than this, and allow for significant redundancy to handle disruptions in service.
Crawling 10B pages with 100 machines crawling at 100 pages/second would take 1M seconds, or 11.6 days. Most search engines crawl a small fraction of the web (10-20B pages) at around this frequency or better, but also crawl dynamic web sites (e.g. news sites and blogs) at a much higher frequency.
Links
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. The term also refers to an industry of consultants that carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients' sites.
Using search engines, visitors can find sites in a variety of ways: via paid-for advertisements in the search engine results pages (SERPs), via third parties who are listed in the search engines, or via "organic" listings, i.e. the results the search engines present users. SEO is primarily concerned with improving the visibility of a site in the organic search results. High rankings in the organic search results can provide targeted traffic for a site. Obtaining that traffic by other means can potentially be expensive. For particularly competitive terms, the cost per click can run several dollars, or more, when pay per click advertising or are used. For even moderately competitive terms the cost can range from a few cents to several tens of dollars per visitor. Given those costs, it often makes sense for site owners to optimize their sites for organic search.
Not all sites have identical goals in mind when they optimize for search engines. Some sites are seeking any and all traffic, and may be optimized to rank highly for common search phrase. This can be a poor marketing strategy for a business because it can generate a large volume of low-quality inquiries that cost money to handle, yet result in little business. The "shotgun approach" to search optimization can possibly work well for a site that has broad interest, such as a periodical, a directory, or site that displays advertising with a CPM revenue model. Other sites target a specific population, with particular needs or interests. Many businesses try to optimize their sites for large numbers of highly specific keywords that indicate a prospective customer who is ready to buy their product. Focusing on desired traffic can generate more high-quality sales leads, and fewer time-wasting inquiries.
Origins of the TermHistory
SEO began in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a site to the various engines which would run spiders, programs to "crawl" the site, and store the collected data. The search engines then sorted the information by topic, and serve results based on pages they had spidered. As the number of documents online kept growing, and more webmasters realised the value of organic search listings, it became imperative for search engines to sort the vast collection of pages they had spidered and display the most relevant pages first. This was the start of a search engine vs. SEO struggle that continues to this day.
Initially, search engines were guided by the webmasters themselves. Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information like meta tags. Meta tags provided a guide to each page's content and relevant keywords. The relationship between SEO and the search engines
In the early 2000, search engines and SEO firms attempted to establish an unofficial "truce." There are several tiers of SEO firms, and the more reputable companies employ content-based optimizations which meet with the search engines' (reluctant) approval. These techniques include improvements to site navigation and copywriting, designed to make websites more intelligible to search engine algorithms.
Search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars. In fact, with the advent of paid inclusion, search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the optimization community.
Getting discovered by search engines
New sites no longer need to be submitted to search engines to be listed. A simple link from an established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and spider its contents. It is rarely more than a few days from the acquisition of the link to all the main search engine spiders visiting and indexing the new site.
Naturally, this means that it is good practice to have some means (such as a site map, or plain hypertext links) so that once a spider finds part of a site, it can navigate to the rest. Otherwise, individual, isolated, dead-end pages must be found one-by-one from outside the site; any pages that are not linked to from outside can only be found by links internal to the site.
For those search engines, like Yahoo, who have their own paid submission, it may save some time to pay a nominal fee for submission.
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