internet search engines

[Robert Remillard]

Could someone please explain to me how internet search engines work?? For example, when I type a phrase into yahoo, or google, how does the search engine decide what web pages to return????
Thank you in advance for your help.

--Robert

[ambhagat]

There are different types of search engines.
Google spends a _lot_ of time searching every page it can find on the internet. It looks at all the words on the pages and, if the page contains the word 'monkey' it files it under 'monkey' in its index. When someone searches for 'monkey' that page may come up.
Yahoo, on the other hand, is a directory. Web pages are added by a human being to its directory, so a web page about monkeys will be added to its index in the section about animals.

Web page authors use lots of ways - both honest and dishonest - to get to the top of the listings for search engines. When writing a web page, you include keywords in the header information to tell search engines what your page is about.

Search engines also accept money from large companies to put their websites at the top of the listings.

See http://www.searchenginewatch.com/ for lots more info on this subject.

[andyc0908]

It sounds like you prefer Google over Yahoo. Is that the best search engine, and if not, which would you say is? I use "best" as searching the _entire_ Internet and as ranking the most relevant results at the top.

Andrew =Þ