Search engines are software systems that find information on the World Wide Web in a systematic way. They take a user’s search query and present it in a line of results, also known as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information that search engines return consists of links to web sites, images, videos, infographics, articles, research papers and other types of files. The algorithms that search engines use to process search queries are complex and vary between different providers. Some search engines offer additional features, such as image recognition and video searching.

The basic components of a search engine are a database and a set of algorithms. The database contains huge internet resources and the algorithm takes a user query in the form of keywords or phrase and then searches it through that database. The process of searching through that massive data is called indexing.

When a search engine indexes a page, it takes note of the words and their location on the page. It also records the frequency of those words and any other information such as embedded media or a table. The search engine then stores that information and presents it when a user enters a search query.

To speed up the indexing process, search engines often cache (or store) versions of pages that are recently indexed. This can be useful when a search engine hasn’t visited the page in some time and a fresher version is required. However, a cached version is subject to the same problems as other pages on the web: linkrot, which occurs when a page that has been stored in a search engine’s working memory loses its linkage to the actual web server.

One of the main reasons that people use a search engine is to get specific results. To narrow the field, some search terms can be enclosed in quotation marks to tell the search engine to look for that exact sequence of words. For example, if you type “search engine techniques” into a search engine, you will get a much more focused result than if you simply typed in the keywords “search engine techniques”.

Another technique to focus a search is to use boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to connect words together. This allows the search engine to filter out unnecessary results and provide more relevant results. For example, if you search for the phrase “cloning AND humans AND ethics”, the search engine will only return results that contain all three of these words in exactly that order.

There are many other search engine techniques that you can use to save time and filter your results. These can be very useful and are easy to learn. The more you practice these, the more efficient your searches will be. So try out these search techniques and see what kind of results you can get! And don’t forget to share your results with us. We would love to hear about your experiences with these search engine techniques!