The Hmm's And Ahh's of Search Engines! (a holida-hobi-whati?)

Phew! Have you recovered from our Google hunt? I thought that a nice relaxing massage by a Swedish masseuse named Fredric and an ice tea was just the thing! But enough about that, let’s review Search engines! How do search engine rank the stuff they find on the internet you might ask? The answer is quite simple, Web Crawler. The we crawler program is specialized to go out on a “Google hunt” such as we have done, attempt to recognise words or phrases and extract them. After the hunt is over, our friend Mr Google keeps them in a safe place for when we need them most, and the links are posted accordingly next to these words. And viola! The search engine, as simple as coin collector!

But then you think, aside from the fact that Mr Google is just an awesome name that I threw in instead of writing technological mumbo jumbo; who or what even makes this search page more useful that another one, so that it is put at the top of your search results (breaths here)? It’s a common fact that we will immediately click on the first link that a search engine gives us because it MUST be the one we are looking for…WRONG. Ha you are so naïve! So just who or what organising these things and who has the right? Look out Charlie Epps, here comes an algorithm! The most common ranking method is exactly that, a lot of numbers that mean something, and is known as TFIDF (term-frequency-inverse document-frequency). It recognises significant words will judge them to see if they are relevant and arrange them accordingly. It’s so smart that it excuses joining words such as or, and, to with, and extracts the important ones. By the way this is all called Weighting. Its not that only way that search engines will organise their information, other forms of arranging include link analysis (which is what our friend Mr Google uses) and it helps to improve the ranking of its results.

Now I think that I have pretty much established my search engine of choice, and the winner is….GOOGLE. I have always used it, its easy to use, is reliable most of the time and always has a funky way of displaying the word Google on the home page. Just puts a smile on your face. I have used ‘Ask Jives’, ‘msn search’, ‘yahoo’ and some others, but I feel so much more comfortable with Google. Well now that you can rest easier at night knowing that search engines are most of the time your friend. I think I shall leaves this blog here!
Until next time bloggers!
TFFN (ta-ta-for-now)
xo