Searching the World Wide Web

Intro
Web Crawlers / Spiders
Catalogs
Organization
Searching

Introduction
There are many ways to search the internet and they are not all equal. Whether your doing research, looking for something to buy or ordering dinner you can find it, compare prices and find the closest one to you. By understanding how searching on the internet works and how to do the best searching you can optimize your internet experience.

What is a search engine? Google.com is a good example. If you have ever used Google , y type what ever you want in to the text box, click next and then you will have in seconds over a million pages waiting for you. What really happens when you do that? Well it depends on which search engine you use. There are many ways that it could work, by understanding how they work you can have a lot better results on your next search.

Web Crawlers/ "Spiders"
Imagine a spider crawling across a web, as it gets to the end of that web it crawls right onto another web that's connect to its web and so on and so on forever. That's what a web crawler / spider program does on the web with specially written software that searches for page after page cataloging it into a special place as its adventure across the web continues forever. While its on the page it captures a version of that page at that moment in time. It keeps information like key words it finds on the page or embedded in the pages code. When you come along and type in a search term the search engine gives you all the websites it found with that particular search term. Most of the major search engines use this technology and if you want to find out which ones, just do a search! On a side note not all search engines are created equal since these programs have to be written by a programmer, they aren't all going to write them the same. Using more then one search engine to find something is always a good idea.

Catalogs
Another very popular way some search engines work is by cataloging sites. How do they do get the sites to catalog though? There are a couple main ways. Some allow users to submit their websites, some only have the sites they have found from searching the net and only keep the ones they like. It really just depends, in my opinion they are great only if they are dedicated to a particular topic. You can find which sites use this technology by doing a web search as well.

Other
Most sites now use both methods and maybe even a few more.

Organization
So after you click the search button and you receive millions of pages to look through you need to know how they are organized. There are many different methods. The most common ways will be discussed here.

The large search engines use a combination of the following methods. Some will rate the site on how many people have links to it on other web pages. Some sites use a program to determine how relevant the term you searched is in relationship to the site. Other sites may not be as friendly allowing advertisers who have paid to have their page show first if a given term is searched. Yahoo.com is famous for this. You might have to scroll through two pages of web page links before you get to one that wasn't paid to be on top.

Searching
Want to get better at searching the internet? Now I'm going to tell you how. The most important thing you can do is "KISS". KISS is an acronym that stands for Keep It Simple Stupid! Here are the steps

Use more then one search engine
Be short, don't search long phases, try to keep it to a word or two
Be very specific
Stay away from common words
Be careful, there is a lot of bad information, viruses, adware etc out there
Don't believe everything you read, see or hear