Before we go any farther lets put the myth that search engines are bias. Search engines, even the giants like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are not biased, they keep a very competitive edge and for the most part offer high quality search results for the customers. If they were bias then they would lose in ranking because the public would look elsewhere for their searches. So put this notion out of your head that the big search engine companies are bias in any form.
So how do search engines work?
Search engines come in three different forms. The first is powered by (web crawlers, spiders, robots).This is one form of search engine. The websites are crawled over like a spider weaving a web and search for special key words and meta tags and links. The information is gathered and brought back to the search engine for indexing the information. Periodically the robot crawlers go back to the site looking for new information to put in the file for the web site. By updating the site helps keep the crawlers active and finding information to help rank your web site.
Human based search engines are search engines that operate by humans when information is submitted to the search engines manually and then the information is cataloged and indexed. No web based crawlers are used in this case.
The third is a combination of both worlds. These are human based and robot/spider based.
The base idea of a search engine is to emulate the user (you). Just keep in mind that all search engines are different and it depends on what the person has submitted to what search engine and what the spiders have found depends on what your search turns up.
One key aspect to search engine searches is what is called search engine Algorithms. You ask what the heck is a Algorithm? “The algorithm is what the search engines use to determine the relevance of the information in the index to what the user is searching for”. Here is a list of types of search algorithms;
1. Uniformed search
2. Informed search
3. SQL search
4. Tree search
5. Graph search
6. List search
Spam-dexing has been hitting the larger search engines for the past few years so these search engines have been updating their technology in an attempt to discourage this type of practice. What happens in spam-dexing is that the developer stuffs the web site with keywords in order to drive up the ranking of the site. Meta tags and key words drive up the traffic to a site because they drive the site up the scale for ranking but now with this technology search engines are now looking at other forms to such as link indexing to increase the ranking of the site.
Search Engine Algorithms are one of the most highly kept secrets in the world of web design and social networking. No one really knows the ins and outs of this tool that the search engines uses. In order to rank your web site it is best for you to find someone that understand and know Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is a whole language in its own and it takes someone with years of experience to truly understand this information.