A web search engine is a website designed and dedicated to helping people search for information on the world wide web. The information that the search engines return is called the search engine result. As with normal everyday life - these results may or may not be relevant to your needs, the results may be inaccurate, the results may be tainted etc. You should always remember that, search engines are mostly automated and use a form a artificial intelligence (AI). Examples of search engine websites are:
- www.yahoo.com
- www.google.com
- www.metacrawler.com
- www.msn.com
Lets say for example that you are interested in learning more about fruits, but specifically the fruit - apple. So you go online, and use your web browser (FireFox, Safari , Chrome, Internet Explorer etc) to go to a search engine website. You will start off by typing the word apple in the search box of the search engine. The "word" that you type in the search box, is also known as a "key word". Once you submit the key word that you are interested in, the search engine will use its internal algorithms to comb the Internet for all websites that it knows about, that use the word apple in their web pages. As you might guess, there will be millions of websites that have the word apple in them. The search engine will return a listing of all these websites that it knows about that have the word apple in them. Again remember that the search engine does not have the type of intelligence that humans have and as a result will not easily know which of the sites is most relevant to your specific needs (also known as your query). However some search engines are artificially smarter than others.
For this specific example of a person looking for information on Apple (the fruit), it is most likely that results that the search engine will return will consist mostly of references to the technology company "www.apple.com" (and their products) instead of to the other type of edible stuff - apple. This is because technology company Apple, website is highly optimized for the keyword "apple". This is an example that shows a search engine returning irrelevant results to your query. To help nudge the search engine in the proper direction , so that it can return more relevant results to you, you should change your search terms, to something like - "apple fruits".
There are numerous ways of making website more optimized for search engines. Some of the methods are pure commonsensical things, while others are more technical. In a future tech-ER episode, we will look into simple ways of making a website better optimized for search engines. In the meantime, you may enjoy the video here.
