Sunday, December 7, 2008

What On Earth Is An Algorithm?

Each search engine has something called an algorithm which is the formula that each search engine uses to evaluate web pages and determine their relevance and value when crawling them for possible inclusion in their search engine. A crawler is the robot that browses all of these pages for the search engine.

GOOGLE Algorithm Is Key

Google has a comprehensive and highly developed technology, a straightforward interface and a wide-ranging array of search tools which enable the users to easily access a variety of information online. Google users can browse the web and find information in various languages, retrieve maps, stock quotes and read news, search for a long lost friend using the phonebook listings available on Google for all of US cities and basically surf the 3 billion odd web pages on the internet! Google boasts of having world’s largest archive of Usenet messages, dating all the way back to 1981. Google’s technology can be accessed from any conventional desktop PC as well as from various wireless platforms such as WAP and i-mode phones, handheld devices and other such Internet equipped gadgets.

Page Rank Based On Popularity

Quintessentially, Google calculates the importance of a page by the number of such ‘votes’ it receives. Not only that, Google also assesses the importance of the pages that are involved in the voting process. Consequently, pages that are themselves ahead in ranking and are important in that way also help to make other pages important. One thing to note here is that Google’s technology does not involve human intervention in anyway and uses the inherent intelligence of the internet and its resources to determine the ranking and importance of any page. Hypertext-Matching Analysis Unlike its conventional counterparts, Google is a search engine which is hypertext-based. This means that it analyzes all the content on each web page and factors in fonts, subdivisions, and the exact positions of all terms on the page. Not only that, Google also evaluates the content of its nearest web pages. This policy of not disregarding any subject matter pays off in the end and enables Google to return results that are closest to user queries. Google has a very simple 3-step procedure in handling a query submitted in

its search box:
1. When the query is submitted and the enter key is pressed, the web server sends the query to the index servers. Index server is exactly what its 8 name suggests. It consists of an index much like the index of a book which displays where is the particular page containing the queried term is located in the entire book.

2. After this, the query proceeds to the doc servers, and these servers actually retrieve the stored documents. Page descriptions or “snippets” are then generated to suitably describe each search result.

3. These results are then returned to the user in less than a one second!
(Normally.) Approximately once a month, Google updates their index by recalculating the Page Ranks of each of the web pages that they have crawled. The period during the update is known as the Google dance.

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