Navigating the Net

The internet can be a magical place. There is just so much STUFF out here. From today’s football scores to the price of tea in China, there’s a good chance there is a website, blog, album, or video series dedicated to it on the internet. But the benefit of the internet is also its downfall. How does one find the price of tea in China on the internet?

Answer: search engines!

A search engine works by going out and indexing or spidering websites. It automatically follows link to link to link. Then it takes all of the content it finds on those pages, and it uses that content to decide what the page is supposed to be about and how valuable that content in. The engine uses very complex algorithms to determine relevance and value in relation to any search term a user might put into the search engine. While most search engines keep their algorithms secret, they do release some general information about how they return results.  These algorithms are updated regularly to be more and more accurate, as well as to keep website owners from cheating to get their pages higher on Google's results page.

And using a search engine is so easy!