What are search engines?

bynishkarsh93

580 followers

Updated 9 years ago

We live in a world today where anything and everything is just a click of mouse away. In such a world of technology where each day, rather each hour sees development of something new,one simply can't ignore the changes around him. Such changes affect his life directly. So it's tough for one to keep himself updated with all these happenings and this is the part where the search engines come in. The question which now you may ask is what are search engines. How do they work? Is the information provided by them relevant or not etc. etc. All the questions you could possibly have are answered below.

"What are search engines?"

Search engines are defined as the programs that searches and identifies items in a given database that corresponds to keywords, phrases and characters specified by user. Many a times they search in documents rather than in a database. They are very helpful in searching for information on the internet. The biggest advantage of search engines is that they are time savers i.e minimise the time required for finding the information. The most popular engines are Google, Yahoo, Bing, MSN etc. which perform the following basic tasks:

1. Search their databases, documents and the internet on the keywords entered by the user.
2. Keep a proper indexing of the words they find, where they find, their relevance etc.
3. They help user to seek the similar or matching or related combinations of the words the user searches.

"How do the search engines work?"

• CRAWLING

If you have ever looked carefully, you must have observed that whenever you enter the keywords as your query, what you get in response is a list of the URL's of the the given query. These URL's are fetched by a web spider(also known as a crawler) which fetches as many documents(or their URL's) as possible. The crawler keeps placing these results in the already made list based on the keyword query. Crawling is a never ending process.

• INDEXING

Next comes in the indexer which indexes the crawled data into the database. Many people are under the wrong assumption that indexing is an easy step! No it's not!! Indexing is not like that you have to search from a few hundred of books or documents and crawl them but instead it's like you have to search a million documents for every query and then crawl and update the database.

• ALGORITHM

Each search engine has an algorithm whose sole purpose is to provide only meaningful results to the queries made by the user. The algorithm used is in general a ranking and retrieval algorithm. This is the most relevant and important step as the algorithm checks your query and then provide you with the best and meaningful information. No wonder why the big companies keep their ranking algorithms patent. They are complex and easily give an edge to an organisation.

"What are the types of search engines?"

The search engines can be broadly classified in 3 types:

1. Powered by robots and also known as crawlers or web spiders. They use these crawlers(automated softwares) to visit and crawl a website and check the content of the website along with the tags and the links available there. A crawler automatically crawls the website periodically and ranks it according to its frequency.

2. The second type is the one that is maintained by human submissions. This is a tedious job as the humans have to find, manage and then submit the relevant information into the databases.

3. Hybrid of the two search engines.

CONCLUSION

The search engines have made our life very easy and has saved a considerable amount of time. It wouldn't be wrong to say that they have given a new face and a new dimension to the virtual world of the internet, on which all of us are dependent. Life without these gifts of science and technology would have been unimaginable. That's all for today!! Happy Reading!! :D :D