Nowadays, research and information seeking is commonly done over the Internet. If you wish to know about something, all you have to do is type in the keywords on the search bar, click the button next to it, and then a list of relevant sites that have information connected to your search appears on your screen.
Sites that help you do the searching are called search engines. Major search engines today include Google, Yahoo!, Live Search by Microsoft (formerly MSN), Askcom (formerly AskJeeves), and AOL.
How do these sites search up the web for the information you need? The process is technical but could be explained in simple words crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.
First of all, search engines search or crawl the web to see what kind of information is available. Crawling is performed by the software called crawler or spider. The crawler follows links from page to page and then they index whatever information they come across. If a site or link is crawled and found to be relevant, it is then marked or indexed by the crawler and then stored into a giant database so it can be retrieved later. Indexing involves identifying...