2.02 The major search engines

There are ten or so major search engines, considered major because they the best known or most used.

Universal
Every web user quickly finds a search engine. Some internet service providers include a search engine in their portal pages. Most web browsers include an integrated link to a search engine. It would be almost impossible to find information online except for search engines.

Using a search engine
The basics of using a search engine are very simple. You enter a list of words into a little box and click a button. The search engine returns a list of all the web pages it has found that contain all of those words visible as text.

The results returned
Returning a list of pages that all contain a particular list of words is simply number crunching – though with the billions of pages the search engines index the list can get a bit long. Google returns three quarters of a million pages containing the phrase “veterinary surgery”. It indexes over eight thousand containing “hypogammaglobulinemia”.

Relevance
The target for all the search engines is to sort the list of pages they return so that their users find the first few results, the top ten in particular, truly relevant to the reason that they are searching. This is highly complex. Google employs several dozen PhD's to maintain their algorithms. Each page they index is tested against more than a hundred variables. This generates a series of scores. These scores decide where the page appears in the results.

Maintaining relevance
The search engine programmers have a continual battle on their hands. Their task is to keep relevant listings, the sites that searchers are really looking for, in the highest ranked results. If they succeed then they attract more users and more advertising income. If they fail then their users move on, their reputation declines and their income collapses.

Tricking the search engines
The search engine programmers are up against a whole community of web site owners who want to get their site into the top ten results for popular search terms – even though their site has no real relevance for the people searching. When the programmers get it wrong your search results get littered with irrelevant sites trying to lead you to online casinos or worse.

How to rank well
The search engine companies continually tune their algorithms. The tricks that get sites higher rankings than they deserve are tuned out of the system. There is only one approach that will let you achieve consistent high rankings in the long term.
The search engines want to provide links to quality sites that are relevant to the terms their users enter in the search box – so provide just that.
If you provide a quality site with lots of text based content then the search engines will be on your side and do their best to present you high in the results. If you create a slim site with little content or try to trick the search engines then you will, sooner or later, be shuffled into limbo far down the rankings.

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