Search Engines - How They Work and Why You Need to Know

Written by Jeremiah Smith on December 5th, 2007 at 9:00 am

Author: Jeremiah Smith

Lesson 1 in the Simple Tiger SEO Training Course

Search engines currently receive more than 500,000,000 searches per day. Of these, Google handles a majority of all of the searches. If your website shows up on the first page of a search engine result, you will get tons of traffic through what is called “organic” or “natural” search results.

Types of Search Engines

There are three main different types of search engines, and knowing the differences will help you tremendously.

Crawler or spider search engines
Directories
META crawlers or META search engines

Crawler or spider search engines actually have a type of code that is called a spider, crawler, or robot. These search engines send their crawlers out to scan the web and bring back websites to add to the index. The internet works on a system of hyper links and spiders use these hyper links to crawl the web. Google is a perfect example of a crawler search engine.

Directories are usually human edited search engines that have a list of categories that you can browse down through. Directories usually require someone to submit a website in order for that website to be included into the index. Directories are trusted heavily by other search engines and most of the time crawlers start at directories before indexing anything else. Yahoo has a directory, but a good example of a directory is DMOZ.

META search engines are a hybrid race of search engines that combine the results of several different search engines into one results page. META search engines usually take the information they gather and compare that information with all of the other search engines and then orders and ranks the list of results. It it in this way that META crawlers such as Dogpile allow us to pull such clean, relevant search results. If you are looking for the perfect search engine, Dogpile may be it because they currently pull information from Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and ASK. META crawlers scrape other search engines for results and this helps the purity of the information. Researchers tend to use META search engines very often.

The Index

Once your site is in a search engine’s index, it will rank for keywords that are used on your website. When someone makes a search query for one or a few of the words on your website, your website will then be included in the search engine results. If you have links pointing to your site from directories like DMOZ, your overall ability to rank for your target keywords increases tremendously. The reason directories affect your ranking so much is because search engines trust directories because they are human edited with a final objective of relevance for searches.

A really useful chart is available at Bruce Clay’s website here. This chart displays the relationships between different search engines.

The next lesson “Keywords - The Backbone of SEO” explains the importance of keywords and how to run a targeted keyword research.

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