How do Search Engines work?

We use them everyday but how many of you really understand how search engines work? Most of us probably don't even think about it, we just click that button and wait for the results to show up. We take for granted the real "magic" that goes on behind the scenes, in milliseconds, after we press the search button.

There are search spiders that crawl through the world wide web in search of new content, information and websites twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. The spiders crawl a webpage and index its content for quick and easy retrieval when a user searches for it. These intelligent littler digital insects keep track of all sorts of information on the page, like the title tag, all of the headings on the page, the links on the page and where they go, and much much more. So when you search for "Web Design Studios" the search engines check all the webpages its' spiders have indexed and analyze those important areas of the page against your search terms. So a website with the phrase "Web Design Studios" in its title tag, headings and links is more likely to show up in your search.

So why then do some pages show up first in the results rather then others? The spiders don't just look at what your content is, they also look to see how many people are already using your site. They do this in a number of ways. First off a site that has content posted where you can leave comments generates a lot of dynamic content that the spiders can sense, almost like a heat map. The spiders also check to see how many other pages out there link to yours, because if someone links to your site they must view your site as important. This all accumulates into a stat that we refer to as "page authority". Essentially the higher your results on a google search the more of an authority the page is on the subject that was searched for.

Fun SEO Fact #1Did you know that nearly 80% of internet users will not look past the first page of search results? They will either try to find the information they want from the first page of results because they trust that those pages are the most accurate, or they will try a new search term or attempt the same search on a different website. If your website isn't listed in the top page of results the amount of organic traffic you can generate is effectively 0

Did you know that there are a lot of built in functions in the Google search engine? Try typing in a math problem like "5 * 5" and the first thing you'll see is a Google calculator result with the answer. You can even type in something crazy like 5^5 X 5 + 25 (the ^ symbol means that the following number is an exponent).

By default Google searches for each word in your search phrase on the websites in its index. So if you type in "Ez web secrets, blog" the search engine will search for the words Ez, Web, Secrets and finally blog. It will return the top results as the sites that have all four words in them, but you will also get results with only three or less matches in it. In order to specify a string that you want to be exact you place "" around the string. For example, if i wanted to search for the best winery in France I would type "the best winery in France".

You can also combine these methods, say I wanted to search for the best winery in France, but I wanted results relevant to the city of Paris. I could type ' "The best winery in France", Paris ' and the first results on the page would be those closest to Paris.

You can also use Google to search within your favorite sites. By specifying the site: parameter you are telling Google to look only at pages indexed at that location. for example: "Site:www.facebook.com The Studio Bee" will search Facebook for all profiles matching the search criteria "The studio bee".

I hope that this little bit of fun education has given you a little bit more knowledge about how search engines work. If you enjoyed this, have any questions or remarks please post a comment below and like and share this post with your friends.