What is a Search Engine?

Google, Yahoo, Dogpile, MSN, are search engines. A search engine pulls information from the web and delivers it to you quickly on a search engine results page.

Example of a Search Engine Results Page

Looks familiar, huh? You use search engine results pages all of the time.

How do Search Engines Work?

For search engines to deliver information to you quickly, they must send out a large number of spiders or bots to crawl the web.

Most people think the spiders are crawling the web after you submit a search. However, there is way too much information on the web for the spiders to crawl every site in a matter of seconds. Once the spiders crawl the web, the information is stored in a large database for quick retrieval. This is called indexing.

Why is this important to your Wetpaint site? This lets you know that the search engines don't recognize changes to your pages immediately. The spiders crawl and re-crawl every site on the web in different intervals. More popular sites, like news sites, get crawled every day, and perhaps several times a day. Other sites might get crawled every two weeks.

The Order of Results

This is the most important part concerning your site. When a person searchs for a subject, a search engine only has one job: deliver exactly what you are looking for down to the smallest detail. If a search engine didn't give you the results you wanted, you would probably stop using it.

Once a search engine returns results, it must rank those results in order of relevance and importance. No one knows exactly how search engines do this, and that is for a good reason. Back in the early days of the internet, some site owners would do perform sneaky practices to trick the search engines. They would do things like type the entire dictionary on their site so that their site would come up for every search, even if it didn't contain information on what the persons was searching for. Search Engines companies got smart changed the way that search engines produce results so that they give a person only results that are relevant.

There are several ways to improve your ranks with the search engines. Though there is no magic way to make sure your site is listed first on a results page, performing as many tasks as you can in the Tips for a More Successful Site section will help your site get listed closer to the top of the results page for searches related to the topic of your site. Sites with lots of traffic get listed first with the search engines. And sites that get listed first with the search engines get more traffic.