A Little bit History
One of the most common uses of engine today on the internet is search engine. Originally, the term engine came from the term "cotton gin", which is a manual machine that separates the cotton from seedpods and seeds. Later, the term indicated a mechanical device which converts energy into a motion or mechanical force, but in the course of the history, the term has come into use also in computer science and the term engine is used to describe a mechnical or digital work.
The first mechanical computing engine was called difference engine. Difference engine is a mechanical digital colculator device. Today we also use the term search engine, which is a retrieval system that helps to find information inside the network or personal computer. Today, this term usually refers to a program that searches on the world wide web, for specifiedon keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. Most of the search engine sending a spider, which fetch a big amount of documents, reads them and create an index according the words contained in the document. In order to create these indices, the search engine uses its privately owned and controlled algorithm.
The earliest engine of searching on the net was Archie (without the "v"), in 1990. This engine could not search by file contents, so in 1991 a new enginewas invented, called Gopher, which was the first tool who indexed simple documents.
These engine tools were developed during the years and soon many web search engines appeared and later appeared the directories, which added great functionality.
The popular search engine on the ner today are Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Despite the sophisticated search engines that exist today, the web is growing faster than the technology of search engines. As you saw in the previews chapters, the evolution of engine was leaded by scholars who produced new inventions of devices and new meanings to term engine. According to history process and the way it seems today, search engine is probably not the last stage in the development of the engine.
How does Search Engine work?
On the wide expanse, there is no doubt that search engine is the key to find information. The sophistication of the program makes it possible to locate information on the website and to know a specific URL. Usually, using the term search engine refers to a form which searches through HTML databases. More than the advantage of weight, HTML can be read easily by the robots (not like photos).
Search engines are basically divided to three different types: engines that are powered by people, engines that are powered by robots and those that combine both human and robots.
The search engines which are powered by human rely on human submissions. People read the information, catalogue it and subsequently, after confirming, indexed the information.
The search engines which are powered by robots (also called crawlers, spiders or ants) use an automated program. The robot progress is quit similar to the human powered search engine; the agents of the software visit web sites, read the information and indexed it. In addition, in this type of search engines, the robots follow the links that the web connects to, and also read all the special tags that provides information (called 'Meta Tags' in the expressions of HTML).
In both human and robot powered search engines, while searching information, the search engine uses only the index that he has already created.
In other words, a web site, which has not indexed by search engine, will not appear as a search result. Moreover, once in a while the search engine updates the index, but if an updating of information on the web has done while the index has not been updated, the web site will remain the way it is until the index will be updated again.
Different Search Engines, Different Results
Why the search results of one search engine are different than the other? If we search for the same keyword, why in each search engine the result will be different?
Each search engine uses an algorithm. Algorithm is a formula or set of steps that has been created in order to solve a particular problem. In search engine the algorithm determines relevant index's information to what the user is searching for.
Checking the location and the frequency of keywords on a page of website are elements that algorithm considers. For instance, a high frequency of keyword on a web page will be considered more relevant. On the other hand, a web page, which contains an overload amount of the relevant word, will be exposed by the algorithm and will be consider less relevant. This is one of the reasons that people learn how to write SEO contents right.
Another element that is considered by algorithm is the way that the page links to other pages inside the website and to other webs.
Part of the answer to the question why the search results of one search engine are different from the other, is due to the differences between the algorithms; the search engine algorithms were created by different people. In addition, another reason is because the indices are also not exactly the same. It depends on the human submissions or the robots spiders.
Search engine is a very sophisticated tool and its technology is even becoming more sophisticated, especially in order to discourage the keyword stuffing - the overload keywords techniques. A way to improve it and which will help the websites to be indexed in search engines, is learning more about the writing of SEO content.