What makes a good Search Engine? By The Want2Find.info Team
A search engine is an online resource for finding information based on search queries defined by the user. Hundreds of millions of people use good search engines every day to find information. The search engine collects and indexes Internet resources (web pages, newsgroups, programs, images, etc.)
What makes a search engine good?
A search engine is different from a directory, as there is no person actually reviewing each site. The search engine is normally an automated computer that "crawls" or "spiders" the web looking for pages, jumping from website to website via the hyperlinks or just looking at all the individual pages within a particular domain. It has several components: search engine software, spider software, an index (database), and a relevancy algorithm (rules for ranking). A good search engines search database contains huge amounts of data, collected from the World Wide Web, newsgroups, and directory projects.
Keywords are the words or phrases which are used by the search engine to locate a site. When a web surfer types in a keyword search such as "Hotels in France" the database will search the millions of sites available and using algorithms unique to each, a good search engine will pull up the best sites in order of relevancy, based on factors such as keywords in the title, description, body and other areas within the HTML code.
All the pages it finds are put into an index with key information taken from the title of the page, keywords, meta tags, and the copy on the page. It then returns the information in the form of a list of sites, listed with titles and descriptions.
Google Google is an example of a good keyword search engine. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more targeted search results than existing systems.
Google’s main mission is to organize the world’s information and presenting it to us in a highly usable format. Google takes into account a number of different factors for determining placement of a site including domain age, site name, and links back to the site, to decide the placement of a site in the index.
Google considers each link to a Web page as a recommendation for that page, with the most-recommended pages pushed to the top of the search results. So, even if your search query yields hundreds of thousands of possible matches, you probably won't need to dig past the first page or two in the list to find really useful resources.
Here is a list of some of the better search engines...
Tips for using Search Engines
These tips should help you use a good search engine more effectively: 1) Be careful with spelling - misspelled words or search phrases will not retrieve much information. 2) Try to be as specific as possible when entering your search terms. If your search term is too broad you will return thousands of results. However, if you are to specific you may not retrieve any results. For example: A search for "Diet" will return over 2 million results A search for "low carb diet recipies" will return around 300,000 A search for "low carb diet recipes rose elliot" will still return over 20,000, but will be more targeted 3) Most good search engines will have a section on their web site for search tips or help - this will tell you how to search for exact terms or similar search terms etc.
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