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About Search Engines
How do Search Engines work?
The exact nature of search engines and how they work is different from one engine to the next but the bigger ones such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing have similar conceptual mechanics and white hat search optimization techniques will positively influence a websites rankings in all three search engines.
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Search engines are powered by elaborate, forever growing, and changing algorithms that are fed data from spiders and bots that run around the net collecting data from one website to the next. For example Google, the worlds most popular search engine (and website for that matter) has a program or bot that they refer to as GoogleBot. GoogleBot will find a website and analyze the code of the website and take a copy or download of all or part of the site back to its digital home where another bot or program will categorize and index the site in the relevant categories and search algorithms that are appropriate. If a user searches for a related keyword of a site that is indexed by that particular search engine then the search engine will display the site listings for that particular website in the search results or output.
No one knows exactly how Google, Yahoo, or Bing work (except of course for those who created the search engines) but we do know some general concepts that are significant to all three. Though you should know that the exact algorithms that these search engines operate with are kept as secret as possible, and all three are different from one another. Even so you will generally find that their results will have the same or close to the same sites listed for certain keywords but the positioning will be different and will constantly shift and change as more and more data and info is indexed and more and more publishers submit and change content.
Calculating a Website's Page Rank
- Site Rank Variables - Information about what factors are considered when search engines configure page rank.
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