The trouble is just where is that information in this blundering massive database of www. It is supposed to have anywhere in a billion pages of data available to the general public, and more is being added to it each day, what with all universities and dot.com (even if most of them have gone bust) working overtime. If we did not have the right tool to dig through this pile of information, it would be of no use. Fortunately, there are tools for that any many of us use them. They are called search engines and web directories. They essentially help you find the web site on which the information you want may most likely be.

To make the best of the money you have invested on the PC and that you spend on the Internet connection, make an effort to learn using search engines efficiently and save time. As search engines are nothing but some software working on machines placed “out there,” you have to realise that they do not have brains to understand what you are looking for. You have to understand how search engines “think” and then present your requirement according to there limited, through magnificent, capabilities. You have to explore smartly.

HOW DO Search Engines WORK?

A search engine in real meaning is a database of all the information that is there on the web and kept it in a certain order so that it can readily be located and accessed when demanded by a common user through a simple interface available on web sites.

 DATABASE 

All the data of the Internet in one place. Yes! That’s almost what it is, or at least that’s what every search engine attempts to have. Google, one of the most popular search engines, is said to have 4,285,199,774 web pages in its database. Software robots called spiders that are sent out to crawl the web perform this Herculean task.

These spiders start visiting sites by getting links from server lists (DNS entries or websites submitted to be indexed), and lists of the most popular or best sites. They then follow the links on these pages to find more links to add the database. While some databases want the spider to send back only the title and URL (address) of each pages visits, or just some HTML tags, nowadays most want them to send back the entries text of each page along with the information on where it was found one more source of getting data is the submission to the search engines by authors of new websites.

The information once acquired has to be them stored on the server of the company providing search engines in such ordered way that it is useful. This data is indexed in such a way that the user may be able to know what bit of data was found where. All words found on various pages are given a weight according to where on the page was the word found, i.e, page title, heading, sub-head, etc, and also how many times. Using this statistics and other algorithms, search engines try and establish the context and relevance of each word in the database.