Search engine techniques involve using special strategies to help find and retrieve information. Whether you’re searching the web, academic journals or a corporate database, these methods can save you time and effort by narrowing down your results. Some examples include using quotation marks around specific phrases to search for a phrase as opposed to individual words, boolean operators to connect multiple terms and truncation symbols. These techniques vary from one search engine to the next, and can affect how a database functions automatically, such as turning off the automatic term mapping in PubMed or disabling automatic searching for word variants in Web of Science.
Search engines work by comparing words and phrases to a pre-compiled list of relevant pages, called an index. The results are then ranked according to their quality and relevance to your query. While this sounds straightforward enough, there are many complex processes that go into search engine technology. This includes crawling, indexing, ranking, rendering and more.
Crawling: Search engines “crawl” pages by following links, and using sitemaps to discover pages. They also use a variety of other signals such as incoming links, page authority and social media engagement. Indexing: Once a page is discovered, it’s added to the index, along with its metadata and other information. Then, the engine uses a complex algorithm to determine how well a page matches a search query. Ranking: Once the engine has a set of results, it must sort them by quality to show the best pages first. This is done by analyzing a variety of factors including the quality and popularity of the page, how well it matches a search query and its overall relevancy. Rendering: Once a page has been ranked, it needs to be displayed in a way that is consistent with the user’s experience. This is accomplished with HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
Search engines are great, but they’re not perfect. If you’re not getting the results you want, try different search terms and tactics. Search suggestions, which appear as you type in the search box, are a good place to start. They can also suggest related keywords or help you narrow your focus. For example, if you’re looking for the latest news about your industry, don’t just search for your company name; that could return thousands of irrelevant results from publishers that are not competitors. Instead, try search terms like “industry news” or “news about your industry.”