HOW SEARCH ENGINES REALLY WORK By Jeff Ferguson
T
he Internet and the World Wide Web we know today would be utterly unnavigable without search engines. But how do Google, Bing, and the other search engines really work? The short answer: Search engines work by filling a database, or index, of billions of web pages through crawling. During the crawling process, computer programs called web crawlers, also known as bots or spiders, download the content and the links to other web pages found on these pages. Search engines analyze these web pages using algorithms for factors such a topicality, quality, speed, mobile-friendliness, and more to determine the position, or rank, in the search engine results presented to users.
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But let’s dive a little deeper. In this study , you will learn: • About Machine Learning • What is a Search Engine? • How Do Search Engines Obtain Their Results? • How Do Search Engines Understand Your Query? • How Do Search Engines Rank Web Pages? • Pulling It All Together: How Google Really Ranks Web Pages • Summary
FIRST LET’S TALK ABOUT MACHINE LEARNING Before we discuss how search engines work, you should understand a little about Machine Learning. According to Jim Stern, author of Artificial
Intelligence for Marketing, “Machine Learning is the automated creation of predictive models based on the structure of the given data.” To say that Machine Learning is a computer teaching itself how to do something is an oversimplification, but it’s an excellent place to start for this discussion. While Machine Learning lives under the Artificial Intelligence (AI) canopy, it should not be confused as being the same thing. Machine Learning is already in use daily in a myriad of computer systems; AI is the name given to a variety of technologies, some of which are still the stuff of science-fiction. Some Machine Learning systems can run on an Unsupervised basis, still requiring data to get started to find patterns in data and reveal correlations. There is also Supervised Machine Learning, whereby we
