Almost anyone can pop onto Google or Yahoo!, type a couple words into their respective search engines and obtain a vast number of results – but are they the results you were looking for? Read on to learn how to use search engines more effectively and avoid unnecessary digging through wasteful results.

Let’s start with a brief overview as to how search engines work. Search engines accumulate their databases by using “spiders” or “robots” which crawl through web space while identifying and reviewing web pages. Once a spider gets to a site, the program indexes the words on the pages of the site. Additionally, web page owners may submit their websites to search engines for crawling, and the eventual inclusion in their databases.

When users search the web using a search engine, the search engine scans its index of sites and matches your keywords with the documents within its database. Therefore, when you ask the search engine to go to work for you, it is checking a database that was created at an earlier date, not actually searching the entire web as it exists at that very moment.

Once you’ve asked the search engine for some results, the engine will follow a certain set of rules to rank the web pages. These rankings may vary from one engine to another; however, the goal of each is to return to you the most relevant pages at the top of the list. In order to do this, the search engine looks for the location and frequency of the keywords you have requested within their databases.

While reviewing the rankings you’ll typically find two types of search results – those which were paid for and those which are organic, in other words, those which the search engines see as the most relevant to a particular search. Paid results, offered by both Google and Yahoo! allow you to bid on specific keywords (such as “preschool toys”) and create an advertisement that links to a website. The higher people bid, the higher and more frequently the advertisement shows up on the page when someone searches for that keyword. These paid results generally show up on the top and down the right hand side of the search results page.

Organic results are commonly seen as the more relevant and trustworthy sites to visit. These results are completely non-biased as search engines do not accept any money to influence the rankings.

Now that you have a better understanding as to how the search engines work behind the scenes – let’s get to the important question

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