What Is a Search Engine?

The Internet puts a ton of information right in front of us with a click of a button. It's huge to begin with but it's also constantly growing, which can actually make it tricky to find what you're looking for. Search engines help us filter through all of that information by narrowing our search parameters, making it easier to find what we need. Let's say you went to Google and did a search for whales; you would get something like 24,400,000 results. Those 24 million results could be about the animal, radio station, movie, books, doctors, games, or the prince of whales none of which you were necessarily looking for in the first place.

How do search engines work?

Well, they are actually very complicated, but at the most basic level, they search for matches to the text you've entered. A search for whales will not only pull up the websites with facts about the actual animal, but could also include links to a person named Whale, a critically acclaimed play called The Whale, a bookstore called Whale of a Tale, or just about anything including the word whale.

How do search engines create the result list?

The site with the most matches typically appear first. The most widely used criterion is frequency. Search engines note how frequently the word or words you're searching for appear. The more times the word or words you searched appear on the page, the higher the ranking, because the search engine believes it to be more relevant.

Search results sometimes contain advertisements.

It's important to remember that most search engines allow advertisers to buy placement spots. Keep an eye out for these. These links are typically at the top of the list and often are not what you're looking for. Google is one of the best at labeling these links; for example it has put advertising links shaded at the top of the page and in a column to the right of the results labeled Sponsored Links. Not all search engines will tell you they're putting an advertiser at the top of the list.

Keep in mind there are global search engines meant to search the whole Web, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. as well as specialty search engines which focus in certain areas: e.g., medical, scientific, religion, or news. For most general searches, though, one of the big guns will probably get you covered; in fact, most Internet browsers let you choose which search engine you'd like to access directly from your address bar.

Next Monday, we'll have some great search tips for you, so be sure to check back!