Continuing from my previous post, I’ll continue to try and explain how Search Engines work.
The Performing Search Engine
At the end of the day a search engine is nothing more than a software program designed to sift through billions of pages recorded in its index to find matches to a search query and rank them in an order that it believes is most relevant. Quite a mouthful.
You’re probably wondering how search engines go about determining relevancy, especially when confronted with hundreds of millions of web pages to sort through, right? Quite simply, each search engine has developed a set of rules and mathematical equations, known as an algorithm, which it uses to set the order of its rankings.
Exactly how a particular search engine's algorithm works is a closely-kept secret, but some general rules are clear that are often used to increase a website's ranking performance. This is referred to as search engine optimisation.
In a nutshell, search engines use on and off page copy to group related pages into vertical themes. If we take a page relating to the entertainment industry, these themes or groups could be music entertainment, movie entertainment, movie star entertainment, etc. Each theme has common words and phrases that best describe the pages the group contains. Some pages may belong to more than one group. For instance, a page relating to movie profits could belong to both financial and entertainment groups.
The SERP (or Search Engine Results Page)
After applying this algorithm to their index of sites, a search engine comes up with a list of the most relevant results according to the search conducted.
To simplify an otherwise complex process – and believe me, it’s complex - , when a user enters a search query, the search engine analyses and searches its index for the web pages it considers relevant to the query. Once it has a shortlist of the relevant pages, it further calculates what order they are presented to the user in, based on further algorithmic factors. These could be a user's location and possibly even their search history.
This algorithm differs between the different engines, which is why different search engines may produce different results for the same query. Each search engine has its niche. It is however not uncommon for a user to use more than one search engine at a time. This further demonstrates the importance for website owners to be indexed and ranked well on all search engines, and not just concentrating on one search engine, such as Google.
Conclusion
The aim of a search engine is to deliver appropriate, relevant, information-rich sites that will satisfy users, first time round. It’s a very exciting challenge and one that sees knew developments from the Search Engines. All you need to worry about though is making your site as informative, engaging, accessible and usable as possible. The rest will happen naturally.
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