The World Wide Web is full of information from websites to blogs and soup to nuts! How do you find things on the Web? It’s not like it comes with an index or list of contents, does it?
The Web is really not that old and has been made available to the general public for approximately the last 20 years. Since that time the information highway, as it is sometimes called, has exploded with information.
It is one thing to have information and quite another to have a way to locate that information. Hence, the creation of the search engine.
What is a Search Engine and How Does It Work?
A search engine is basically a program that quite literally searches documents, videos, and other media for keywords that the user (that’s you) requests information on and then your search returns a list of these pages where the particular keywords were found.
Search Engines work by using something called a ‘spider’ to look at all the pages on the Web for the keywords contained in each page.
Every search engine creates its own algorithm (rules for the computer program) to determine how the spider or indexing tool conducts its searches.
The most recognized of all search engines are Google, Yahoo, and now Bing, a new search engine developed by Microsoft. Google is probably the biggest search engine in the world but you can use a variety of search engines to find what you are looking for. Some sites will appear on one search engine and not on another, depending on how the search engine does its indexing.
For this reason you may want to do your search with a couple of them. The websites listed will be ranked differently on each so what you see may differ.
How to Use a Search Engine
Let’s use Google as an example: When you go to Google.com you are taken to a page where you can type in what you are looking for.
An example might be ‘chocolate’ or ‘healthy chocolate’. The Google search engine will start looking for every page on the Web that has the word chocolate or healthy chocolate, depending on what you typed in.
There will literally be millions of sites listed and you then have to wade through the list to see which site you want to look at.
You can narrow the search by being more specific. Perhaps type in ‘healthy chocolate Boston’ and then see what results come in. It can be quite fun and interesting.
Be specific in your searches and narrow them down as much as possible so the search engines can be the most useful to you.
Now you know what search engines are and how they work, you should be ready to play and enjoy the experience.
