By Justin Harrison

A search engine, such as Google and Yahoo, are tools that allow users to find information on the World Wide Web by searching with a specially designed tool. The results of a search are organized into a list which includes web pages, information about them and links to them. In some cases, it includes images. Search engines are operated algorithmically in conjunction with human editing.

A search engine uses web crawling, indexing and searching in that order to provide the most accurate results related to a particular search. Search engines work by storing information about millions of web pages that can be retrieved at the request of its user. The web crawler, or "spider," is used as an automated web browser. It follows every appropriate visible link. The web crawler analyzes the contents of each link to determine how the pages should be indexed.

Words found inside the pages are extracted from the description and allocated appropriate meta tags. Meta tags are also taken from contents the webpage itself to establish its relevance. Data from the sites is collected, indexed and stored to be retrieved when it's needed.

The major search engines, such as Google amass all, or a miniature portion of the source page, or "cache", in addition to information the web page offers. The search engine, AltaVista stores every word from every page. Storing the cache helps the search engine filter more easily because web pages are updated constantly. Google's technique of indexing relieves the "linkrot" and allows users to be sure that the content they find in their search results will be up to date and utilizable. The cache can be helpful when obsolete information is removed. The cache allows users to find and recover information from archived sources.

Search engines will examine keywords entered by the user and obtain a list of organized search results. Summaries may also accompany web links on the results page.

Many filters and specialized web crawlers create a proprietary method for analyzing web pages for results. While a keyword can be found a very large amount of websites not all sites are relevant to the users purpose and companies pride themselves on result relevancy.

Page rank is latest addition in the techniques used by search engines to sort out various web pages and their contents. Page rank decides the relevance of a particular page by studying the correlation between its meta tags, descriptions, keywords used and the content of that webpage. The search engines rank those sites high that have association with high ranked web pages. The page rank is essential for any web page or site as it determines its probability of featuring at the top of any particular search.

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