Before the internet came to be how did people find the stuff they needed to? Well the answer is books. Yes books that you had at home, the fictional and non fictional books that were stacked high at libraries, your textbooks and so on. People would head to the library with their notebooks and look through 20 books and spend hours and hours just to find out one piece of information. That’s how people would do research, and when you tell people about it they find it hard to believe. And it hasn’t even been that long, it’s only been 37 years, and people just assume that it was 70 or 80 years ago.
Having the internet is such a blessing, it makes work so much easier, no more having to spend you day in the library with 20 books towered high on your table. Now the internet will help you, no matter how big, and difficult the task is. There will always be a small piece of information that you can find out. Next time you are searching for something whether shopping or trying to set up a local hookup on a popular sex app like Meet n Fuck (seen here), you should understand exactly how you are being directed toward that dating site or online store.
Now the thing about this is that people search as much as they want but I don’t think anyone has the slightest clue on how it works. All of you are familiar with Google, Bing, Yahoo search and what not right? Well these are what you call search engines, which will be discussed later on. But the point is that most people don’t even know how it works, I’m pretty sure that they’re wondering “how do search engines work?” Well that’s where I come in.
What are search engines?
If you look at the back of a book, a non fiction book, or any sort of book that relates to the real world or is filled with past information and so on you are likely to find an index. An index is where important topics, and words are addressed with the page numbers so you don’t have to spend your whole time flipping through the book. That last page contains all the information you need to conduct your research. It just makes the whole thing easier. This is exactly what a search engine is, an index online basically.
In more technical terms it is a program that will identify items in a database that corresponds to characters, keywords and phrases, and so on. These keywords are specified by the users; with them it will do world wide searches on different sites and are in correspondent with the keywords. It is basically a software system that was introduced to and designed to carry out web searches. There are tons of search engines, it is not just one, and here are some of them:
- Bing
- Yahoo
- MSN
- Baidu
- DuckDuckGo
- Yandex
These are just a few but there are much more, but not many people know this as people are familiar with Google, and probably haven’t even heard of the others. So the market share and demand of them is extremely low.
So how does it work?
How do search engines work is a big question on most peoples minds, because even though they use it only a certain amount of people know how it works, and get the correct results we require. So how does this happen?
As you most likely know everything is connected, for something to occur something else has to happen. If that chain is broken then there is no way for the event or thing to occur as the way it was supposed. This is how search engines work as well. Now the internet is a big place, to look through it manually is a huge tasks. So to overcome this problem the will use web crawlers, they are search engine bots or spiders. They will crawl into billions of webpages and will navigate through them to download, and follow the links to pages.
There is something called the search engine index, it like what we talked about before, this basically contains all the URLs, and a number of key signals, like the keywords, the content, the freshness of the page, and the previous users engagement of the domain, how people would interact with it.
When a search is done it is processed through the algorithm and the index and it is done in a hierarchical manner. But to get better results search engines will use other types of data such as location, the language that is detected, the previous search history, and the device being used. But sometime what you want may not show up. This could be because of files which tells not to visit the site, the directives on the webpage, or because of the page being low in quality or having less content, and the URL being an error.
The advantages of search engines
The use of search engines can come in handy, there are many advantages of it, and one being the amount of time saving it does. Doing searches manually, will take forever, but not when it comes to this. It will provide you with all the information in less than 30 seconds. Plus it increases the relevancy, which means if you need to find something that is special and just based on that you can do a search and you’ll be provided with a relevant result.
Furthermore these search engines are free. On some you may have to pay for scholarly purposes and private engines but for most you don’t have to. So that means you can get the best of the best all for free. Also with search engines having advanced search options then it is possible to find you something that is too difficult to find in books, or normal research on the web. With the keywords, locations and everything being used it will be enough for you to get the precise information that you need. And with it being comprehensive then it will be easier for you to find what you are looking for as the engine has an idea of what you are looking for.