In the online world, you hear a lot about search engines. If you’re new to the internet you may be wondering what a search engine is and how it works. This post is a quick introduction to search to make it easy to understand.
A search engine is a tool for us to use when we’re trying to find something online. It’s like an index in the back of a book. We use it to find something specific, like a particular website or an answer to a problem.
Here’s how a search engine works:
Search Engines use spiders to index websites. No, not real, creepy-crawly spiders. In search engine world, a spider is an automated program that is run by the search engine. A spider visits a website, reads the content on the site, makes note of the links that the site contains, then returns all that information back to a central data hub, where the data is indexed. Spiders visit sites frequently, sometimes daily, to check to see if anything has changed or if new information has been added. A spider has the capability of indexing millions of pages each day. That’s a lot of information to keep track of! Do you get the connection between a spider and “the web”? 
So what search engines do we use? Well, there’s a few, but the most popular search engine, by far, is Google. It’s simple to use, and pretty accurate.
One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page. A search engine such as Google has a complicated algorithm that determines which information is most important for a particular keyword search. The most important results of a search show up first in the search results. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.
That’s the quick explanation of what a search engine is and how it works. Companies spend billions of dollars every year trying to optimize their websites to manipulate the search engines so that they show up at the top of the search results list. They also spend just as much money for paid placement, which is the act of actually paying Google for top placement.
It’s big business, for sure. But if you’re a business owner, and you don’t show up in a Google search, you’re not going to get much business on the web.
I hope you found this post helpful!
