Special note: This article isn’t written by Jan Hvizdak, the services-seo.net founder, and is only translated from Slovak to English language. It’s goal is informational only. You may redistribute this article „as is“ only if you provide a link back in the references list. This document was written by student(s) and was tested in order to pass the copyright test.

Introduction

People with no internet experience may spend long hours finding relevant and useful information on the world wide web. The information, which are they looking for makes them very frustrated and it’s similar to finding an exit from an unknown highway. Let’s imagine an informant who is capable to show us a way to our goal if we provide him some right phrases leading to what we’re looking for. In order to understand how any search engine works and deliver results, we must determine what a search engine is. This article’s goal is to show some simple facts about the most used search engine as something what we use every day for our business, entertainment, fun or whatever.

What is a search engine?

Basically, search engines are web servers which work with large databases of webpages and which determine their relevance, popularity and other factors. Nowdays, we can assign the „fulltext“ term to all quality search engines, since they’re able to read the content on these web sites. Their servants are robots, which are also called crawlers, or bots. Crawlers are programs, which focus on gathering available information together. There are many webpages and web sites on the internet nowdays, some of them are important for the entire world, some of them are important to local communities, some of them aren’t even important. Only a few web sites of them are search engines; The most known search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, Lycos, HotBot, etc.

How do search engines work?

Generally, there are three steps which can be included into one circle:

• 1) Robots (Crawlers) gather information together. There must be some „starting point“, so they follow links from a directory. DMOZ is a good example of such directory. Naturally, links don’t go from directories only; Webmasters also link world together. If a crawler finds a new web site, it’s marked for indexing. Basically, you will get your web site indexed if there is a link pointing to it from somewhere. However, more inbound links mean faster (re-)indexing and also mean deeper (re-)indexing than if there were only a few links pointing to your web site. Webpages which crawlers visit are marked as visited, so they’re re-visited later and crawler focus on new webpages only.
• 2) The information are incorporated in order to fit the databases and tables structure (indexing). Search engines now analyse words which are important for each page included in their databases. Each word (also called keyword or phrase) gets some importance and the relation „word<->webpage“ is being stored in the database.
• 3) The last step: Publishing new information.

When a internet user visits a search engine and enters his query which contains some keyword or phrases, then a search engine compares the search query to it’s own database records, analyses the relevance and then arranges the search results which are nextly shows on a visitor’s computer.

Usability and efficiency of a search engine heavily depends on relevant results. Basically, there are millions of webpages which contain the visitor’s search query, however only a piece of them are ranked as really relevant ones.

There are numerous ways of how search engines arrange the search query result pages (SERP), however the most used method nowdays is the link popularity factor which equals the number of incoming links to a webpage.

A search query:

It is a word or a set of words which are entered by a user into the search box of the search engine’s web interface.

A link (hyperlink):

It is a dynamic element of a webpage which points to another document or a concrete position within the actual document.

Google’s history

A famous american mathematician, Milton Sirotta, created an unusual number. It is composed of the number 1 and 100 zeros which follow that 1. He named it Googol. This number defines some unthinkable and great value which is greater than the number of elements in the space is. This fact inspired two americans who were dreaming about creating an unlimited, uncountable sea of information available on the internet. They scrambled a few letters and this was the name for their search engine – Google.

In the beginning, it’s name was BackRub, since the importance of a webpage was calculated via the number of incoming links to it. Of course, Google also gave the importance to meta tags as well as other on-site factors some time ago. As time goes by, manipulation of SERP via on-site SEO is getting more difficult than before. Thanks to Google’s algorithms, people started to trust this search engine. Another factor which influences the SERP is PageRank (named after Lawrence Pagea), which was created in order to arrange the webpages with focus on their popularity within the web as whole. The PageTank values vary from 0 to 10. If there are more links to a webpage, which Google has found already, then that webpage naturally gets higher PageRank value.

What is Google?

Google is one of many search engines. It was created in the year 1996 and it’s creators are two guys, Larry Page (was of age 24 years) and Sergey Brin (was of age 23 years). It all happend at Larry’s home, in his room exactly (not in a rich firm with lots of financial sources). In the beginning, they tried to co-operate with David Fill who worked for Yahoo. However, he decided not to work with those two guys, so they started their own business. Naturally, they were in need of an investor. Andy Bechtolsheim, a person who is well-known in the computer business, their colleague helped them with the financial injection immediately.

The primary goal of Google was to develop a new method how to search through internet documents. The Google company (Google Inc.) which provides Google is located at Menlo Park in California, USA. Originally, there were only a few employees and the number of them didn’t exceeded 8. Nowdays, this giant’s value is more than 150 billions of US dollars. The search engine serves more than 200 millions of search queries each day. It’s database stores more than 3 000 billions of internet documents and is also capable to search images, videos and other document formats, usenet discussion groups, news servers and on-line products. Usenet (User’s Network) is a system of integrated points which shares each other’s web news and it’s beginning dates the born of the internet. Meanwhile, it grew up to virtual net, or so-called service provided within other networks. Google was searching 4.28 billions of webpages, 880 millions of images, 885 millions of newsgroups messages in july/2004. Totally, more than 6 billions of items. The major part of those documents are stored. Google supports many languages including Arabic, European, Asian. Nowdays, people tend to use „google it“ instead of „find it“.

Conclusion

Google is considered to be the best search engine worldwide especially because of it’s speed. There are also other projects within the Google which support it. So what is the denotation of Google? For all of us, it’s simple and clear; It allows us to search for information easily and saves our time. Let’s imagine the world without Google. It wouldn’t ruin, however we would lose something great, something what helps us everyday. Just count how many times do you use Google each day.