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The Science Behind Search

behind search

science behind search

Google, Safari, Bing or any other search engine are serving us today as a way of portal where we can request all kinds of piece of information in the world for just a quick moment. It’s been proven that all the information in textual form that you can search through engines is around 40 times bigger than digital content of entire book collection in world’s largest library, the Library of Congress. So you can imagine what kind of a challenge is to provide access to people to such enormous volume of content. But the truth is that many people today have no idea how these important technology pieces actually work, and especially businessmen because if they want to rank higher with their website they have to understand the science behind search on Google and other engines.

Basically all search engines that are modern are using practically the same approach to organize websites. They are sorting results by many factor varieties. They also perform crawling which means following links for browsing over 60 trillion pages that are online. The final step is indexing pages, that means that pages are getting sorted and stored so that engines can react and find the information faster. Did you know that some of the search engines like Safari, Bing and Google are rewarding pages if they have shares on social media, relevant keywords and content, appropriate keyword number and number of links pointing back at them.

Those search engines are also lowering pages that contain spam, hidden links or text, pornography or keywords that are irrelevant. Search engines are using various methods so they can speed up your search. First common technique is pre-processing the data which means when user requests something, that query is not being sent to thousands and hundreds of different websites. Instead of that, matching the information is happening in stored data on one site.

The next method is called smart representation. With this technique what’s most important is to minimize the time required for search. This is done with effective data structure called ” a tree ” which guarantee to cut short the time for overall search. Of course there are costs with these techniques. Sometimes it can happen that if a person searches something search engine can lead to so called rotting links. This means coming to point where that page does no longer exist. What’s more, links to new content on web could also be missing. This can happen due to re indexing of the pages or delays in crawling.

Companies of search engines have their data centers constructed all around the world. They are storage facilities of a monstrous size, holding more then thousands of machines that are processing large numbers of information with high speed. So when person perform search, they want results almost in instant and even if they experience delay for about 3-4 seconds it can cause them dissatisfaction.