The Basic Inner
Workings of Search Engines
What is a search engine?
Basically, a search
engine is a software program that searches for sites based on the words that
you designate as search terms. Search engines look through their own databases
of information in order to find what it is that you are looking for.
How
Do Search Engines Work?
Please note: search
engines are not simple. They include incredibly detailed processes and
methodologies, and are updated all the time. This is a bare bones look at how
search engines work to retrieve your search results. All search engines go by
this basic process when conducting search processes, but because there are
differences in search engines, there are bound to be different results
depending on which engine you use.
- The searcher types a query into a search engine.
- Search engine software quickly sorts through literally millions of pages in its database to find matches to this query.
- The search engine's results are ranked in order of relevancy.
Name
of Search Engine Spider
Google
Spider
GoogleBot
Googlebot is the search
bot software used by Google, which collects documents from the web to build a
searchable index for the Google Search engine.
Yahoo
Yahoo!
Slurp
Yahoo! Slurp is a web
crawler based on search engine technology Yahoo! acquired when it purchased
Inktomi. Slurp was the web crawler for Yahoo! Search until Yahoo! contracted
with Microsoft to use bingbot instead.
Bing
BingBot
BingBot is a
web-crawling robot (type of internet bot), deployed by Microsoft to supply Bing
(search engine). It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index
for the Bing (search engine). It replaced msnbot as the main Bing Crawler on
October 2010.