Week 1: Clear

Although I have had a lot of experience utilizing computers, I never thoroughly understood just how the search engines of the world received their information. One amazing fact that I learned was the mere fact that Google has over 1 trillion URLs in their database. To me, that almost seems imperceptible. Search engines have been around for just about twenty years now, which to me seems outrageous considering I was in diapers and computers were still considered a technology of the future.

However, the search engine as we know it is very different from its original model. Now, every one from students to grandparents use "google" as a verb and challenge the scope of one's knowledge by just "googling it." Although for the layman, it is merely that simple, there is much more below the surface that makes search engines tick. Search engines utilize bots to compile its database worth of URLs. These bots crawl on to websites taking keywords and links from the page performs this until it has reached the end of links (reaching the deepest pages in a website).

This bot searching takes seconds compared to an average person trying to look through pages upon pages of websites to receive the final information needed. After the bot has completed the search through the website, it is then filed into a large database where keywords are utilized to gather similar matches on websites across the Internet. A person can then search for the information he or she needs by simply typing in keywords in the query line to receive results with exact matches to his or her needs.

Search engines have become one of the driving factors in making the Internet easy enough for each every person to navigate. In the business world, this saves time and effort on educating each other on various topics one may not know a lot about to begin with. Virtually, any piece of information can be found on the internet in seconds flat because of search engines like Google and Yahoo. From a student's standpoint, search engines have helped me with term papers as well as research companies I have had interviews with. With more and more information out there on the internet, the only way to manage the information you want, need and inadvertantly receive is by utilizing search engines.

For more information on search engines, please visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine. Although wikipedia may not be the end-all for researching information you may want, it gets one started on the right track to understand the basis of a variety of topics including search engines.