Even before trying to strategize the best ways to go up in search engine rankings, designing a super efficient website and planning your way through the maze of search engine marketing tactics, you might be interested in taking a step back to wonder –
How do search engines work?
Here is how wikipedia defines Search Engines:
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system, such as on the World Wide Web, inside a corporate or proprietary network, or in a personal computer. The search engine allows one to ask for content meeting specific criteria (typically those containing a given word or phrase) and retrieves a list of items that match those criteria. This list is often sorted with respect to some measure of relevance of the results. Search engines use regularly updated indexes to operate quickly and efficiently.
Well, we think we pretty much know what search engines mean, but how do they work? Simply said, there are three steps a search engine goes through – web crawling, indexing, and searching. Search engines store a vast amount of information on web pages- information which they amass using a web crawler (or spider). The pages are then analyzed and indexed based on links and “tags”. So, when you type in your query into the search box of your chosen search engine, the engine then checks all their indexed information based on the keyword you used – and voila they churn out the results ranked according to relevance.
This is of course a really simple way of looking at the search world, but here are a couple of other references you can look into in order to read more into search engines and how they work:
Marci Crane from PromotionWorld also tries to answer that question in her article “Ever wonder how Google Googles and Yahoo Yahoos?”
For those that absorb presentations better than reading long text -- Learn the net has a presentation on how search engines work.
Another good site to visit for more detail is How Stuff Works
where they give a simple to understand yet detailed definition of how search engines work.
Finally, it is always useful to have a glossary of terms for you to use as you try to understand the lay of the land
