Search Engines and Keywords - Basics for the Newbies

There are billions of Web sites covering about every aspect of our human needs, wants and nice-to-haves.

The Internet is a great source of all kinds of information we need, including business information, academic research, medical and scientific breakthroughs, world news, and what's going on in other parts of the world which used to be unreachable prior the advent of the Internet.

Search Engines

When the Web inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, conceptualized the World Wide Web, he did so to make it a system of sharing information from different geographical locations. He probably did not intend it to be the world's largest depository of knowledge. Now, it has become the world's largest library, and because of its enormity, there's no one reliable way of retrieving information except through the use of search engines. The greatest challenge is locating the pieces of information that we need from the immense ocean of web sites. An obvious resolve is to make use of a search engine, designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. Anyone who uses the computer is familiar with search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and others. Nowadays, even individualized and business Web sites have search boxes. All we need to do is type a keyword or phrase into the search box, click 'Enter' and there you go! What appears is a list of thousands of websites we can use at our fingertips.

Types of Search Engines

Not to be too technical about it, search engines can be categorized as a

• single search

• meta-search

• directories

Where there are instances of overlaps between results from competing search engines, no one engine covers the entire web, not even the giant Google.

Single search engines (also called 'spiders' or 'crawlers') continuously scan the Web by using programmed robot-like search agents. They visit the Web sites at regular intervals and record a variety of details such as domain names, special information called meta-tags, headers, first-page content, Web site popularity and other attributes. Once found, Web sites are indexed into a database. When a user queries the database, the list of sites is ranked according to its complexity and unique in-house algorithms. This very simplistic mechanism I've described is how the search engines basically work.

Meta-search engines are programs that return the first hits of several single search engines. An example is the Dogpile. It sends user requests to several other search engines and consolidates the results into one list according to their source.

The rationale is that the Web is too large for any one search engine to index everything and that a more comprehensive results in searching can be taken by combining the results from several other engines. This can also save time from having to use multiple search engines separately.

Directories. They classify information according to predetermined criteria and headings. Yahoo is an example of a directory. Practically, everyone is a single search engines user.

Keywords

We are often overwhelmed by all the Web sites we find in our endless search. The quesiton  is  how  many of these sites are relevant to our needs? How about another situation wherein after spending long hours searching, we hardly or can't come up with the right information results?

Keywords are what we need. They are the relevant words or phrases we type-in or submit to describe and identify what exactly we are looking for. Simply, if we want the color black, then we search for 'black' and not 'blue-black' or 'gray.' In other words, we have to be more  specific with our key words or key phrases. We should always bear in mind that the Internet is a dynamic environment and so many things are bound to keep changing. For example, the search engines now are using much more advanced techniques, logarithms more sophisticated. The buzz words are search engine optimization (SEO), content density, and so forth. Online searching and researching can be exhausting but challenging, and certainly a joy, when at day's end, we have in our hands information we need.

Relevant Sites:

Google

Yahoo

MSN

Ask