Search engines use a series of techniques to help you find what you’re looking for online. Whether you’re searching for a new website, a product or just want to do some quick calculations, these tools can save you a lot of time!
Crawling and indexing
When you type something into a search engine, it uses a set of algorithms to determine what information it has on the web that may match your query. These algorithms work on a number of different factors including relevancy, context and location.
In order to crawl and index content, search engines use software bots to crawl the internet. These bots visit pages in order to get a feel for their contents and to discover links that are relevant to a user’s query.
Once a page has been crawled, it is indexed in the search engine’s database and arranged in terms of its relevance to the search query. This is how Google and other major search engines find the content that they display in their results.
Phrase searching
When you want to find specific phrases, you can enter them into the search box using quotation marks around them. This is a handy way to narrow down your results by only finding information that contains the words in that phrase.
Truncation and wildcards
You can also truncate or add wildcards to your search queries. These techniques can be especially helpful if you want to include words that are spelled differently but still have the same meaning, for example, behavior versus behaviour.
These techniques can also be used to limit results by language. For example, if you’re looking for recipes in Finnish, you can use the “finnish” qualifier before the word “recipes.”
Filetype operators
The search engine is smart enough to figure out what kind of files you’re trying to find, but it doesn’t always know what kind of files they are. That’s why you can use filetype operators to tell the search engine to only look for certain types of files.
This will give you more focused results, but it also means that your search engine has to do more work. So it’s probably not necessary to use this technique unless you really need to.
Proximity searches
Some search engines allow you to specify the distance between two keywords, for example, “who were the British prime ministers between 1920 and 1950?” This will result in results that have dates ranging between 1920 and 1950, which is what you want.
There are many other ways to improve your search results. Some of these methods can be quite difficult to master, but they are worth the effort if you’re looking for a quick answer or want to do some calculations or measurements.
The most important thing is to remember that the algorithms that search engines use are very complicated. The best thing you can do to optimize your site is to make sure that it is relevant and useful to its target audience.