With the widespread growth of the World Wide Web a specially designed tool to search through the information available was developed called the search engine. Using both algorithms and human editing the search engine will present results organized in a list consisting of web pages, information, links, and images. These results are viewed by the user after inputting a keyword or keyword phrase in to the search engines search field.

The search engines stores millions of pages of data available on the web and then uses different processes to deliver the most relevant data required by the users. Web crawling, indexing and searching are different processes that are used for the purpose and the order remains the same. The web crawler which is also known as the web spider works by scanning all the visible links. The web crawler, working as an automated web browser, examines all the pages and takes a decision on the indexing of the pages.

Mata tags and even words from the webpage are studied to classify the webpage and its content. All these data are stored for future usage.

The major search engines, such as Google amass all, or a miniature portion of the source page, or “cache”, in addition to information the web page offers. The search engine, AltaVista stores every word from every page. Storing the cache helps the search engine filter more easily because web pages are updated constantly. Google’s technique of indexing relieves the “linkrot” and allows users to be sure that the content they find in their search results will be up to date and utilizable. The cache can be helpful when obsolete information is removed. The cache allows users to find and recover information from archived sources.

Search engine users normally input a keyword or key phrase into the search field. The engine will search for their particular keyword and key phrase on the World Wide Web. The search engine index will provide an organized list of results with the best matched web pages. A short summary of each webpage describing the contents is provided along with the list.

Many filters and specialized web crawlers create a proprietary method for analyzing web pages for results. While a keyword can be found a very large amount of websites not all sites are relevant to the users purpose and companies pride themselves on result relevancy.

Increasingly search engines have been implementing a page ranking system in which each page’s descriptions, keywords and content are scanned for relevancy to the inputted keyword and their index. Pages with higher ranks get seen more often at the top of the list. If a site is linked to a high ranking website that site receives a vote that increases its ranking.