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How Does a Search Engine Work?
Search engines utilizes three different elements to operates:
1. Crawling – First, search engines deploy a series of automated agents, known as spiders, web robots or crawlers. These agents rapidly jump from webpage to webpage, scanning content and cataloging the images, text, links and meta-data from each webpage.
2. Index – These agents are employed to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. This index represents the entire universe of pages that can appear in a search engines result section. For instance, Google contains billions of documents.
3. Algorithm – Each engine deploys a complex algorithmic formula, which is used to determine the relevance of each individual webpage. As search must be deemed fair and unbiased; when a user conducts a search, the search engine retrieves all pages that match it and then uses the algorithm to rank the pages in order of relevance.
Google's algorithmic formula is called 'PageRank'. Go to 'what makes Google search unique' section for information. Or http://www.google.com/technology/ |
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