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Bear in mind that there are tons of elements that provide to how search engines work, and some of them are well-kept secrets. Google, the biggest search engine, conserves some of their operation under wraps to block fraud and dishonesty.

Web Spiders and Bots

In the past of the world wide web, a site would often have to be submitted directly to a search engine in order for listing on that search engine. This was often the sole way to obtain a listing on a site like Yahoo! due to directory listing sites depended on human editors to pick the topics and contents of directory listings. Some search engines had rudimentary ways to search pages on the Internet. The problem is that search engines hadn't yet developed the ability to filter results very well. By using a search engine, the user couldn't be assured that he or she would even come upon pages related to the keywords typed into the search engine.

After all, at present, no submission is necessary in order to be listed in search engines. Because technology has evolved, search engine listings are much more refined and certainly more user-friendly. Today's search engines spend lots of time, money and research in order to supply a searching service that will give the user the best web experience possible. In fact, the search engine business model relies upon this fact. The more people that visit a search engine, the more web traffic that site will receive. The more web traffic, the more people will see advertising on that search engine. Since search engines frequently rely upon advertising to support the site, this works out for everyone. The user gets better search results and the search engine gets more audience to their site.

How do search engines administer an improved web experience for their users? One technology development that has improved the typical web search is the spider or bot. A web spider is a program run by the search engine. Instead of relying on the slow speed of a human editor, search engines can now rely on computer programs that never need to stop searching websites on the Internet. The only reason of these programs is to "crawl" the web all day, every day. These computer programs are, in essence, looking over every single website they encounter. These programs search through websites, checking links, and examining keywords. The spiders will also look at HTML elements within the pages like page descriptions, meta tags, and page titles. Basically, these spiders are used to assemble a large number of information from websites on the web. Here is a list of elements within a website that are scanned by search engine spiders:

• Text within the website

• Links within the website

• Page descriptions embedded within HTML

• Keywords embedded within HTML

• Photos and photo descriptions and alternate text

All of this information is then assemble into a series of databases holded by the search engine. This database is what eventually helps search engine users find the info they want. When a user goes to a search engine and searches for the term "kittens," the search engine will then go to the database of all indexed information. The search engine will look for the keyword "kittens" within all of those databases, and then presents this information to the user. In order to give the best results to the user, the search engine will also sort this data by relevancy, putting the sites that are most related to the keyword or words at the top of the listing. By "indexing" all these sites, including their links and keywords, search engines can then provide a rank for each of these pages.