How To Use Different Ways To Search On The Internet

You, of course, go to one of the 3 major search engines website, Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft's Bing. Type in your word or phrase then hit enter and sift through the potential billions of results that are returned.

For most of us, it is a hit or miss affair of what we want to find, yet its easy, straight forward and quick. Depending on what words or phrases you have used, your results will come up as expected or will be a little different.

If you search for www.mywebsite.com you will 99 times out of 100 see that website appear at the number one or two spot on the first page of the search engine.

If you tried 'my dog eats its tail' since this phrase is specific, you may end up with some interesting results! (go and try it and see what happens, then come back)

That last search you may use as your dog may have a behavior issue, and you may be trying to find out specifically, why your pet is eating it's tail. That also leads to another possible search if you are aware, dog behavior, or animal behavior.

You may see similar results also generated on a couple of words you have used, such as;

• my dog eating
• my dog ate it's tail
• my dog is eating it's tail
• my dog chewing his tail
• etc, etc
  

Your searching for information on recent behavior and trying to nail down a specific reason for why your pet is doing this. As an end result of your search, you may find what you are needing, or you may be throwing your hands in the air, thinking I can't get the information I need and it's all too frustrating.

How do they work? The short answer is how long is a piece of string?

No one person or company has the 'inside scoop' on how it all happens. If someone claims they do its either advertising to claim your money, or they are full of it. Having said that....

There are some qualities and events that take place known to at least, have an influence or affect to a degree on searches.

Lets look at some

• Meta elements
• Back Linking
• Indexing
• Registering (sometimes called 'pinging')
  
• Page Rank
• Social Bookmarking

Meta Elements -

Are elements of a website or webpage (html code) that provide structured meta data about a page. Meta elements often help search engines categorize a web site into a particular category, although the reader of the website won't see this.

It is also used for influencing SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In the early days of the internet, this played a significant part of having your website rank highly via using a number of highly sought after keywords. As time has passed on, this still has a minor impact, yet nowhere near the power of back-linking and pagerank.

Meta elements are often used to tell search engines the name of a webpage and how to categorize the site when search engines 'crawl' and index that page or pages.

Back linking also known as, incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, inward links and juice.

A backlink is when an incoming link from another site, links to and allows traffic to another website. For example lets say you have a blog about Motorcycles In Connecticut.

You decide to write a Hubpage about Buying Motorcycles In Connecticut. Your hub may have one link to your blog. You also write up a lens on Squidoo about Servicing Motorcycles In Connecticut and have one link to your blog. You again now write an eHow guide on finding and purchasing Appropriate Motorcycle Parts In Connecticut and have one link to your blog. Finally you write one article and submit for publishing to Ezine Articles about Touring Around Connecticut On A Motorcycle and have one link to your blog in your author bio.

You now have four distinct backlinks that may or may not provide more traffic, to your blog.

Back links are influenced also by a websites PR (Page Rank) the better the rank, the better considered authority of the website, hence considered a 'better back-link'

Search Engine Indexing, ( and this ones a doosy! )

Is done by collecting, collating and storing data, for the purpose of speed and accurate data retrieval. This is done by using various disciplines and advances in linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, statistical analysis, physics and computer science.

Meta search engines use the retrieval of meta elements to return a result, as other engines use full text and some meta tagging storing the indexes in a cache for permanent storage and retrieval.

Indexing is one of the primary tasks of search engines used by the majors and are updated via,

• robot.txt files in html documents
• updating or changed tags and meta-tags
• updated, changed or new pages or partial pages
  
• updated, changed or new pages or sites
• analysis of formats of, video, text, rss feeds, pdf documents, video, feeds, etc
• relevance of indexed data (is it new? has it changed? does the site have high PR?, etc)

The algorithms used are many and are constantly updated by the major search engines and are are one of the most highly guarded secrets.

Registering a site or webpage (or pinging) via updating linked websites uses a service (like Pingoat) to let blogs or social bookmarking sites know that your site has updated or new content.

This 'pinging' process tells these linked blogs, social sites and search engines that you have new content, so when search engines crawl your search, their spiders trawl over your site and index your new data. The benefit here is it saves one valuable time to not have to constantly update each site you have manually to your linked sites.

Page Rank is a link analysis used (actually its named after Larry Page and has a patent owned by Stanford University of which Google uses under license) by Google thats determines the assigning of a numerical 'weight' or authority ranking, of hyperlinked sets of documents (commonly websites) to measure the importance of it on the internet.

This is defined by the importance of a page receiving inbound links, as well as the importance of those outbound links inlinking to another high PR page. In other words a PR 5 page receiving inbound links from a PR 4 group of sites is considered more 'authoritative' than a PR 5 page receiving links from a group of PR 3 or less pages.

Again in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) PR is still considered important due to the fact that SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) keyword results are viewed to have better search engine results with keywords linked to high PR than those of lower PR.

Social Bookmarking is one method for people who use the internet to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks (in effect, links to videos, music, search results, blogs, forums, just about any page on the internet that can be bookmarked on a browser) of web resources. Unlike sharing of computer files (like using Torrent clients) the resources themselves aren't shared, merely the links that reference them.

Very much like social networking sites, users can post, share, tag, reference, make public, make available to all or specified groups, or save for their own purposes. Others can search for, find, save and share these bookmarks themselves.

For example, I may come across a user that has bookmarked a Hub on Motorcycles In Connecticut, I can then using email, link in that bookmark and share it with my email contacts, making that bookmark available to more people to view and hence give the owner of that hub, more potential traffic.

You can do the following for various and different ways to search for information on the internet.

You can use the common search index engines such as

• Google - www.google.com
  
• Yahoo - www.yahoo.com
• Bing - www.bing.com
• lycos - www.lycos,com
  
• altavista - www.altavista.com
  
• aol - www.aol.com

These are US Centric sites, and one can use more localized sites for country specific searches. For example when I go to www.google.com searching from www.google.com.au is available underneath the search on the bottom right. As shown in the picture

Subject or Web directories are another resource, they are topic specific and have already filtered results down to a more specified area. One can find a readily available topic to search for in alphanumerical order or search within these results.

Places such as these specialize in this type of search

• about.com
• dmoz.com an open directory project
• dir.yahoo.com Yahoos open directory
• business.com focusing more on business related searches

Topical searches is an area to look for non text based searches. Have a look at the top of Yahoo and Google and you will see listings to search for different topical categories, such as

• images
• video
• local
• shopping
• news
• mail
• and web search site specific

Enterprise search, these are usually using the technologies from the internet, search engines designed with the capability to search and retrieve emails, documents, files and extract information from relational databases internal intra-nets of companies. They are almost always internal use only.

Meta-search engines are designed to obtain and retrieve a users search, not just from one engine but multiple and varied engines and other similar sources. These may provide results not just from search engines, but in addition, news feeds, rss feeds, social bookmarking, social networks, multiple search engines (major and / or minor) video, document and music sites.

Not all of these meta search engines operate the same way and are usually return a result based on highest relevance, and may not show which resources were used to obtain the results. They also attempt to cater for one instance of each search to ensure no duplication of search terms for the same or similar sources.

A new emerging technology, which is not surprising are Social Search Engines, these engines attempt to find searches from popular sites like social networks, newsfeeds, rss feeds, blogs, forums and content from 'live' sources that update much more often than static sites. Some of these new ones are

• wink.com
• wowd.com
• delver.com
• oneriot.com
• sidestrip.com
  

There are various other highly specific types of 'search engines' that cater for university, scientific and medical fields, of which some or none are available to the general public.

There are also various ways to specifically do advanced searches to tightly focus on more relative keywords and highly targeted searches. That is the subject of another hub (if there isn't one on that already?)

With all the 'background' provided on how search engines work, these are basic understandings, and the true power, inner workings, calculations and algorithms are only known to those few whom work for Yahoo, Google, et al.