Website Promotion Information
A search engine consists of three things: a spider or crawler tool, the Web page index or database, and the search Web site. Answers to some questions on the topic will clarify how these elements fit together.
What is a search engine?
How does a search engine work?
What is keyword weighting?
What are Boolean operators?
What are meta-tags?
Are there different types of search engines?
What is a search engine?
A search engine is a special Web site that aids users find Web pages related to a certain subject. A user enters keywords related to a particular topic and the search engine sorts through a database index of millions of Web pages for matching information.
How does a search engine work?
Search engines use an index of Web pages. Most search engines use “spiders” or software robots that constantly scan Web pages for information keywords to build an index. The search engine keeps a record of these words and where they were found. The information is indexed and stored in a large database.
What is keyword weighting?
In addition to recording a keyword and the location of the Web page in which it appears, some search engines also record the number of times the word occurs on a page, assigning a weighting accordingly. The number of times a word appears or its weighting is directly related to the relevancy when that specific word is searched for.
What are Boolean operators?
Boolean operators help a user refine their search query when looking for specific information or doing a more complex search through a search engine. The most common Boolean operators are “AND” which means both search terms have to appear on a page for it to be retrieved, “OR” which indicates that either term can appear, and “NOT” which excludes documents containing a specified term. Users can search for documents containing specific words strings by enclosing those words in quotation marks.
What are meta-tags?
Meta-tags give a Web site control over what keywords will be associated with them by search engines. This can aid in cases where the same word has different meanings and for influencing the weighting certain keywords will receive with reference to the site.
Are there different types of search engines?
Search engines are mainly crawler-based, but can also be consciously compiled or a hybrid of the two. Crawler-based search engines have their indexes created automatically with the use of spiders. Consciously compiled directories require human intervention to submit site descriptions. Hybrid search engines combine these two methods of creating indexes.
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