Basics
Web searching 101
The internet is a big place, with millions of users and billions of webpages. This makes it the world’s greatest source of information on almost every topic, but it also means that it can be difficult to find exactly what you are looking for. For most people, the most effective tool for finding what you want quickly and efficiently is a search engine. There are many search engines and sites on the internet today, such as Microsoft Live Search or Yahoo! Search, but the most popular is Google and is used by millions of people every day.
Search engines typically work by crawling over the internet and indexing the webpages they pass. They extract information about the webpage, such as the contents, the topic, where the site links to, who links to the site and any metadata (data about the webpage) that is present. When a user enters criteria to search on, the search engine check this against the index it has created and will return a list of results that match the criteria, usually sorted or ranked by how relevant the results are to the criteria provided. Then, hopefully, the user moves on to the page containing the information they need from the link provided
However, there is more to searching than that. There are many ways to search more efficiently and use searching for different purposes. I’ll be attempting to uncover these on this site and welcome any feedback or suggestions you may have.
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Tags: Basics, Google, history, metadata, Microsoft Live, Yahoo!
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