Notifiblog: How Stuff Works Thursday!

I'm on a mission today.  I want to know How Internet Search Engines Work!​

Skipping the bit about "web crawlers" and "spiders" (shudder), let's get on to some really good stuff.

(Straight from the HSW article) "Meta tags allow the owner of a page to specify key words and concepts under which the page will be indexed."  Good news:  meta tags can help find indexed words that can have multiple meanings, focusing on the meaning you want.  Bad news:  meta tags can have nothing to do with page content.  Ever gone looking for something nice and found something NSFW instead?  However, "(t)o protect against this, spiders will correlate meta tags with page content, rejecting the meta tags that don't match the words on the page."

(Straight from...) "To make for more useful results, most search engines store more than just the word and URL. An engine might store the number of times that the word appears on a page. The engine might assign a weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the meta tags or in the title of the page. Each commercial search engine has a different formula for assigning weight to the words in its index. This is one of the reasons that a search for the same word on different search engines will produce different lists, with the pages presented in different orders."  RANKING ROCKS!

(Straight...) "The searches defined by Boolean operators are literal searches -- the engine looks for the words or phrases exactly as they are entered. This can be a problem when the entered words have multiple meanings. "Bed," for example, can be a place to sleep, a place where flowers are planted, the storage space of a truck or a place where fish lay their eggs. If you're interested in only one of these meanings, you might not want to see pages featuring all of the others. You can build a literal search that tries to eliminate unwanted meanings, but it's nice if the search engine itself can help out."  Welcome, concept-based searching and natural-language queries!

 

The actual article, linked above, is chock-a-block with more information.  This HUMBLE posting is intended to inspire you to read more.  Later, as I will, when I'm on another break from work.  Cheers!