About Search Engines

History of Search Engines

The history of search engines actually began before the world wide web. After WWII, Vannaver Bush urged scientists to work together to build a body of knowledge for all mankind. He proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible memory storage and retrieval system. he named this device a memex.

The first few hundred web sites began in 1993, and most were at colleges. Before web pages, Alan Erntage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, developed the first search engine. He named it Archie. Archie helped solve the data scatter problem by using a regular expression matcher for retrieving file names matching a user query. As word of mouth about Archie spread, the University of Nevada System Computing Services group developed Veronica. Veronica served the same purpose as Archie, but it worked on plain text files.

Parts of A Search Engine

Search engines consist of 3 parts. Search engine spiders follow links on the www to request pages that are either not yet indexed or have been updated since they were last indexed. The pages are crawled and are added to the search engine index (also known as the catalog). The third part of a search engine is the search interface and relevancy software.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines work by accepting the user inputted query. They check to match an advanced syntax or misspellings. they check to see if the query is relevant to other vertical search databases and place relevant links to a few items from that type of search query near the regular search results. They gather a list of relative pages for the search results. The results are then ranked based on page content, usage data, and link citation data. Searchers generally only click on the first few results of the query.

There are basically three types of search queries. Informational queries seek static information about a topic. Transactional queries are used for shopping or downloading. Navigational queries refer to a specific URL. Understanding how search engines work is critical to the success of your internet marketing campaign. There are a number of tools available to analyze what words visitors are searching on to reach your site. By analyzing the search queries, your marketing campaign can be expanded to capture the largest audience possible.