Search engine techniques are a set of tools a user can use to improve his or her searches on the web. These techniques can help users find what they’re looking for without wasting time or energy on useless results. Search engines are useful tools for anyone who knows how to use them, but they can be confusing to those who don’t. With a little practice, most people can learn how to make their searches as quick and productive as possible.
Most search engines are powered by a computer program that indexes and catalogues information found on the World Wide Web. The program is called a web crawler, and it works by visiting websites on a systematic basis. It then looks for and stores information relating to keywords or other definable tokens, including URLs and HTML-based fields. The information is then stored in a database, which can be searched by a textual web search query. The information is displayed as a line of search results, sometimes referred to as a search engine result page (SERP).
Search engines rely on a combination of several different types of algorithms to return the most relevant results to their users. Some of these algorithms are proprietary, but most have a common core: evaluating the quality and relevance of web pages. This is done by assessing the number and quality of links that point to them, as well as evaluating the content and context of the pages themselves. The search engines use this information to rank the most relevant sites, and display them first in the search results.
Some search engines can be used to search only specific types of documents, such as news articles, images or audio and video files. The ability to do this is usually offered through a link in the top left corner of the search results. Search engine optimization is an essential part of running a website, and it has a direct impact on how well the site is searched.
Using a search engine correctly can save a great deal of time and frustration, but it is important to understand the differences between a broad match, phrase match and exact match search. A broad match is one in which all words or parts of a word are used, whereas a phrase match includes only phrases that contain the searched words. An exact match is when the words appear in the order you enter them, with or without a space in between.
Many databases allow you to search for phrases by using brackets. For example, if you wanted to search for smoking AND cancer OR tumours OR neoplasms you would type them in this format:
You can also use the truncation option of most databases to search for a particular word or part of a word. The most common truncation symbol is the asterisk, but other symbols may be used and are typically described in the help text of the database.