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2.3 Anatomy of a search
In the last unit of the course we began to show you how search engines work. For the sake of simplicity, we can consider the search process to work something like the following:
- Search Engine Spiders the web
- Search engine caches pages that its spiders on its servers
- User enters a search query
- Search engine checks the search query against its index
- Search engine returns what it beleives to be the most relevant results for that query
Diagram 1: Anatomy of a Search
Although the process is actually more complex than this, the above diagram is useful in helping us to visualise how searches work, more so in reminding us that when we enter a search term, the search engine does not actually rush off and check every page on the web. This would take far too long. Instead it checks your search term against an index that is stored on its servers. Spiders working their way around the web constantly update this index.
Note: because pages are indexed in advance of searches, the results returned might be out of date. When you click on the link for one of the results, for example, you may find that the page has been updated since the search engine last spidered it, or even that the page you want has moved.
If I carry out a search for cheap web-hosting, the search engine checks its index to see which pages carry the terms ‘cheap’, ‘web’ and ‘hosting’. It then returns a results page containing what it believes are the most relevant pages for these particular keywords.
Let’s look at a typical search result page. Thispage shows the results for the above search in Google (Illustration 1). The results page is set out as follows:
- Search box with our search query
- The number of results Google returned for our search query (plus the time the search took)
- Sponsored links. This is paid-for advertising. For this results page, Google has selected adverts that are relevant to our search query.
- Search results. This section shows the pages that Google thinks are most relevant to our particular search terms. These listings are free.
- Link/Page title. The text is the exact text that appears between the title tags (<title></title>) on the page that the search result links to. Notice how keywords from our search query have been highlighted.
- Page description. This text is commonly the actual text that appears in the meta description of the page that the search result links to. This is the text between the quotation marks in the HTML tag <META NAME="description" content="YOUR TEXT HERE">. Again, Google has matched this text with our search query.
- Domain. This is the address of the page linked to.
- Cached page link. Unlike the above link, which links to the domain that the page is on, this link takes us to the cached version of the page that Google has stored on its server.
- More results. Links to further pages of results
We will now look at some of the ways in which search engines rank pages when determining search results.
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