Most likely, you have probably used a web search engine such as Google, AltaVista or Yahoo! to find specific information on the Internet. Did you ever stop and wonder how exactly do search engines find that information? We will explain that to you in this section. In so doing, you will begin to discover how to efficiently structure your web site to obtain maximum brand strength from search engines.
It’s a very common misconception that when a user enters a query into any search engine, the engine interrogates the Web to find pages that match the query. That is NOT how it works at all! The search engine searches its own copy of the Web. Every search engine actually creates its own copy of the Internet. This copy is called an index. The size of a search engine’s index varies from search engine to search engine, but it is always smaller than the Web as a whole. For example, as of August 2003, it is currently estimated that the Web presently consists of approximately 3.4 Billion pages, whereas the largest search engine index is currently about 600 million pages. Read the rest of this entry »












