There is no doubt that the advent of the internet has created many new colourful words and phrases to the English language. One is "search engine".  The next is Google – which is derived from the word googolplex being the number 1 with 100 zeros after it.  But more importantly, Google is the big gorilla when it comes to people searching on the internet.

A search engine is simply a software program. It allows the user to type in a single words or a series of word that the user considers relevant to what they are seeking information on. The program then searches an index of databases to see what it has that it believes is relevant to the search query. It then displays the results to the user, who can choose a relevant result and click the hyperlink to access the site.

We all know that computers are getting faster and faster, but obviously it would be technologically impossible to search every existing website, blog, document, video, etc. Especially when it returns 57.9 million results in 0.15 seconds (this is the result in Google if you search for "search engines").

How does it do this? The answer lies in the index database. Search engines are constantly looking at everything on the internet – all the little nooks and crannies. In the way of technology, the programs that automatically go around seeking information are called "web crawlers" although we like the more descriptive "web spider" and "web robot". Exactly what they are seeking and what information it extracts when it gets there is one of the great mysteries.

The information it finds is then indexed with the index being based on titles, descriptions, words, etc. The index database then helps organize the data so relevant information can be readily found. Simple eh? Well not really.

An untold amount of time and resources are devoted to working out what the key things that are captured by web crawlers and indexed by the larger search engines. This was the start of the booming industry of "search engine optimization" or SEO as it is universally referred to.

We’ll talk more about SEO a little later.

Marshall and Gary