How Search Engines Work

The Spider software ‘crawls the web seeking new pages to gather and add to the search engine indices’.


This is a figure of speech. In truth, the spider doesn’t do any ‘crawling’ and doesn’t ‘visit’ any web pages. It requests pages from a website in the similar way as Microsoft Explorer, or Firefox or whatever browser you use requests
pages to display on your screen.


The difference is that the spider doesn’t gather images or visualize designs – it is only interested in text and links AND the URL, from which they come: it doesn’t show anything and it gets as much information as it can in the shortest time possible.



A spider loves links because they guide it to other web pages that have the things that it loves, more text, links and URLs.


The Index software catches all the Spider can throw at it. The index makes sense of the mass of text, links and URLs using what is called an algorithm - a complex mathematical formula that indexes the words, the pairs of words and so on.


Fundamentally, an algorithm analyses the pages and links for word combinations and assigns scores that permit the search engine to judge how important the page (and URL) might be to the person that is searching.


The Query software is what you see when you use a search engine - it is the front end that everybody thinks of as a search engine. It may look simple but it presents the results of all the remarkable search engine software that works away invisibly on our behalf.


The main feature of the query software is the box into which people type their search terms.


Type in your words, hit search and the search engine will try to match your words with the best web pages in can find through searching the web.


The query software doesn’t search the web - it checks the records that have been created by its own index software. And those records have been made potential by the raw material the spider software collects.


What you need to know about search engines


What you need to appreciate is that the search engine has done all the hard work of collecting and analysing web pages, BUT it only makes that information existing when someone does a search by entering words in the search box and hitting return.


The words people use when they search consequently resolve the results the search engine presents. We call them keywords - that might sound fancy but keywords are only ‘the words people use when they search’.


And keywords are what Wordtracker provides - many millions of them. Use keywords in your website copy and you will show a profit: ignore them and your online business will surely die.

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