People use search engines to find the information that they want, but have you ever thought of how search engines actually work?
Today, the big search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN find and index website pages using programs called spiders or crawlers. Search engine spiders automatically browse the web with some pre-programmed methods. The spiders create copies of all the web pages they have visited and store them for the search engines to use later. The search engines index the copies of the web pages so that these pages can be found again quickly.
The spiders of the search engines, even Google Bot (Google’s Spider), can only crawl a portion of the web due to the enormous size of the entire web. The ranking of the ‘crawled’ web pages has become important. Using mathematical formulas or algorithms, search engines can rank the web pages in the order of importance. For example, link popularity was one of the first important elements invented and factored into Google’s complicated ranking algorithm.