Search engine techniques involve a variety of methods used to improve a website’s ranking in a search engine. They may include improving page speed, adding meta data and structured data, adding redirects if pages change, implementing canonical URLs, and other technical SEO practices.
Search engines are used by millions of people every day to find information on the Web. They crawl and index billions of Web pages, and present a list of results ranked by relevance. The result is a search engine results page, or SERP.
The basic process for a search engine is to scan all the Web sites in the world and build an index of words, phrases, and other definable tokens. The index helps the search engine understand what a Web site is about, and where to locate it.
There are two general types of search engines; those that use human powered methods to create their index and those that use a crawler based method. The crawler based method involves scanning and associating all of the words and other definable tokens on a page, while the human powered method involves creating a database of keywords.
When a user searches using a keyword the search engine index is queried to find the preferred site. The search engine also uses its algorithm to assign a weight to each entry in the index to help determine a ranking for the keyword placement.
Another major component of the search engine process is the translation of a user’s search query. This is done through a variety of methods including natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and other processes to translate the user’s text into a search engine-friendly format.
This initial translation process is a big part of the search engine’s overall optimization, as it allows the search engine to better understand what users are looking for. It also helps the search engine eliminate misspellings and add synonyms, which are more relevant to the user’s search query.
Many search engine algorithms use a form of topic modeling, which is the process of analyzing a group of words and determining contextual relationships between them. By identifying the contextual relationships between a group of words, the search engine can accurately predict what a particular Web page is about.
A good example of a search engine using this technique is Google. The algorithm identifies topics within the content of a Web page, and it will then display related information if the user searches for those specific topics.
Some search engines also allow the use of boolean operators to expand and limit the scope of a search, which is important in reducing the number of irrelevant results returned. The boolean operators are AND and OR, and the operator NOT is also commonly used.
When using these boolean operators the user should be sure to place brackets around the keywords they are searching for, as the search engine will look for each word within the bracket first, then combine them with other words.