An internet search engine is a website which allows you to search the entire World Wide Web for information relating to keywords that you type in. You can search for many different things on search engines like websites, images and even maps. So how does a search engine choose and return a list of website pages that match your search?
Firstly, search engines are continually searching the World Wide Web with a thing called a web crawler, also known as robots (bots) or spiders. This special program looks around web pages and adds them in to its database, which in turn forms an index. Information on web pages like the title, names of headings and other special areas are stored in the search engine's database for future searches performed by everyday people like you and me.
When you search for something, the search engine checks its database index for web pages which match your query. For example if you type in icecream all web pages relating to icecream on the net will show up in your results. Where they show up in the results is another thing altogether.
Search engines have to choose which web pages to recommend, higher in the list than others, in a list of sometimes millions. Each search engine has an equation they use to determine rank in relation to a specific search using things like relevance, popularity and the history of the web page. These equations constantly change as the internet evolves.
If this has wet your whistle, check out iiHelp for more information on using search engines.