If you’re doing any type of business on the internet than search engines like Google and Yahoo! could play a large role in the success or failure of your business. Even though most internet user have experience using search engines, many don’t know how the engines work.
For website owners it is important to understand how, at least at a high level, search engines work so they can take advantage of the website traffic that only search engines can deliver.
Search Engines are special sites on the Web that are designed to help people find information stored on other sites. There are differences in the ways various Search Engines work, but they all perform three basic tasks:
– They search the Internet or select pieces of the Internet based on important words,
– They keep an index of the words they find, and where they find them, and
– They allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index.
Early Search Engines held an index of a few hundred thousand pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand inquiries each day. Today, a top Search Engine will index hundreds of millions of...