When you want to search the internet, or “surf the webâ€, you’ll very likely use the Google search engine (http://www.google.com/) which is estimated to have 70% of the market at the present time.
Have you ever wondered just how this works?
Well, first of all, when you search on Google, you are not actually searching the web, you are searching Google’s index of the web. So the next question is, how does Google create this index?
They use software programs called spiders, or web crawlers, or web bots (short for robots) which start out searching a few web pages, then follow the links on those pages to more pages, continuing on and on and in a very short time, have reached millions of pages stored on thousands of machines all around the world. Google’s index is based on all the words the bots find; not all search engines work this way, but today, we’re just discussing Google.
If you want to find some information, you type in the main words and Google goes away and searches for all the pages they have in their index that includes all your key words. For example, say you want to know how much an African Elephant weighs, you’d type the words in say African elephant weigh and back would come a list of approximately 200,000 results for you to look through.
It’s interesting to note that if you type in African elephant weight, you’ll get a smaller result and that’s because African elephant weigh will include results for African elephant weight, but not vice versa.
To get more specific information, you just type more key words (called keywords), such as African elephant weight at birth or white African elephant. Now, this last one is interesting, because we all know that the term “white elephant†has nothing to do with real elephants, so if we really want to get information about a white elephant animal, we need to enclose the term in parenthesis, so instead of searching for web pages with all the words individually, Google will only search for all the words inside the ” “ marks as well as any other words not inside them.
My trial search today brought up 376,000 results for white African elephant, but only 93,200 for “white African elephant”. Parenthesised search results still may not necessarily contain the phrase “white African elephantâ€, just the words in order, something like the following, which might not be relevant to your search:
Black & White African Elephant preview
Isolated, White, African Elephant
it’d make the whole enterprise something of a white (African) elephant - this is a page about football kits
Google can search for images, maps, videos, news and more to help you refine your searches. Want to find a picture of an African elephant at birth? After you have typed in your search term, just click on the word “images†at the top left hand side of your browser window (the search page you are on). You will get images related to the subject, including some that are not what you might expect.
People with websites naturally want search engines to find the pages they publish, so part of the web publishing process includes SEO (search engine optimisation) to make them Google friendly & thus get a Google ranking. There are probably millions of web pages that never get found at all.
Some other search engines you might like to try are:
Microsoft’s relatively new Bing http://www.bing.com/
Yahoo http://www.yahoo.com/
Ask http://www.ask.com/
AOL http://www.ask.com/
Hotbot http://www.hotbot.com/
Answers.com http://www.answers.com/
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