In the various business meetings and events that I have recently attended, I am amazed by how little people actually understand about the internet. Because I have used it so much in my work, I take for granted how easy it is for me to search the term “racecar”, or to check my email and Facebook account. For many others, it is much more difficult to do such “simple” things. So, today I want to do a post explaining exactly what search engines are, and why they are such a helpful tool to use.
What is the purpose of a search engine?
There is a clear and concise purpose for a search engine, to give you the best results possible for any search term you look up. When you are searching for the term “peas”, for example, you wouldn’t want pages that related to “tomatoes.” So here is what these search engines do:
Search engines send out “spiders”, or “bots”, which “crawl” around the internet looking for and “indexing” websites so the search engine can return the correct results for any search term a user submits.
Did I lose you on this last sentence? Let me try to explain it a little better….
The terms “spiders” and “bots” refer to the powerful computers that go, or “crawl”, from website to website looking for information. The internet is also known as the “world wide web”, so the terms “spiders” and “crawl” seem fit. When these computers “crawl” the internet, they read web pages and then store, or “Index”, the information about the pages into a database. “Crawling is done 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and the spiders can crawl millions of pages each day. That is why computers have become such a necessity and luxury, they never need a break.
Now there, that wasn’t so hard, was it?
Now that you have a large database of indexed web pages, it’s time to start searching information.
What happens when I search for something?
This is the only part, that you as a user, actually see happen before your eyes, so it is pretty straight forward! Let’s say you are searching the term “racecar.” When you type this term into the search box, your computer looks through billions of records from the indexed database and chooses the best pages pertaining to your specific search term. What is so amazing about this process, is that they actually search takes only a fraction of a second. The results are then listed so that you can easily click on a link that will take you to the website of your choice.
What is Google?
The term “google”, has been made popular by The Google Corporation, a search engine used to looking up information on the internet. So much so, that it has become part of our language… we have all heard “just google it”, which just means to look something up on the internet in order to find out more information. There are many other search engines available that do exactly the same thing, but Google has become the largest and most commonly used.
Why is a search engine important?
As I am writing this, I am reminded of a high speed internet commercial I saw a while ago. There was a guy on the computer and because it was so fast, he got a blue screen saying that he had “reached the end of the internet, goodbye!” He then yells to his wife, “Honey, I’m done!”
With the billions of web pages out there, it would be impossible to actually go through all of them, and actually reach “the end.” Search engines do all of the work for us! Now people and websites can be found by anyone, with a few simple clicks!
Without search engines, the internet would be pretty much useless. You wouldn’t be able to “search” for anything!!