Organic vs. Paid Search

Search Engines

Internet search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, are special sites on the web that are designed to help people find information stored on other websites.

There are differences in the ways the various search engines work, but they all perform three basic tasks :

• They search the Internet — or select pieces of the Internet — based on important words.
• They keep an index of the words they find, and where they find them.
• They allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index.

Early search engines held an index of a few hundred thousand pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand inquiries each day. Today (Mar 14, 2007), a top search engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries per day.

The Parts of a Search Engine

Search engines have three major elements :

First is the software robot, also called the spider or crawler . To find information on the hundreds of millions of web pages that exist, a search engine employs special software robots to build lists of the words found on websites.

The spider visits a web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. This is what it means when someone refers to a site being “spidered” or “crawled.” The spider returns to the site on a regular basis, such as every month or two, to look for changes.

Everything the spider finds goes into the second part of the search engine, the index. The index, sometimes called the catalog, is like a giant book containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. If a web page changes, then this book is updated with new information.

Sometimes it can take a while for new pages or changes that the spider finds to be added to the index. Thus, a web page may have been “spidered” but not yet “indexed.” Until it is indexed — added to the index — it is not available to those searching with the search engine.

Search engine software is the third part of a search engine. This is the program that sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and rank them in order of what it believes is most relevant.

Paid Placement Listings

Most major search engines carry paid placement listings, where advertisers are guaranteed a high ranking, usually in relation to desired words. These paid listings are usually segregated from editorial results and labeled to highlight that they are ads. The exact position of the paid placement listings can vary. Sometimes, they appear above editorial links. Other times, they appear at the bottom of editorial content. “Sidebar” style generally runs ads in a column to the right of a search engine’s editorial listings.

Search Engine Watch generally uses the term “paid placement” to describe ads that guarantee placement, but you may hear others refer to these ads using different terms, such as “pay for placement,” “pay for performance,” “CPC listings” (for cost-per-click) and “PPC listings” (for pay per click). The last two terms reflect that paid listings are often sold on a basis where advertisers only pay if someone clicks on their ads.

Search for anything using your favorite search engine. Nearly instantly it will sort through the millions of pages it knows about and present you with ones that match your topic. The matches will even be ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Of course, the search engines don’t always get it right. Non-relevant pages make it through, and sometimes it may take a little more digging to find what you are looking for. But, by and large, search engines do an amazing job.

More about organic search engine optimization? how the search engines calculate their search results

As WebCrawler founder Brian Pinkerton puts it, “Imagine walking up to a librarian and saying, ‘travel.’ They’re going to look at you with a blank face.” OK — a librarian’s not really going to stare at you with a vacant expression. Instead, they’re going to ask you questions to better understand what you are looking for.

Unfortunately, search engines don’t have the ability to ask a few questions to focus your search, as a librarian can. They also can’t rely on judgment and past experience to rank web pages, in the way humans can.

So, how do search engines go about determining relevancy, when confronted with hundreds of millions of web pages to sort through? They follow a set of rules, known as an algorithm . Exactly how a particular search engine’s algorithm works is a closely kept trade secret. However, all major search engines follow the general rules below.

Location, Location, Location…and Frequency

One of the main rules in a ranking algorithm involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Call it the location/frequency method, for short.

Remember the librarian mentioned above? They need to find books to match your request of “travel,” so it makes sense that they first look at books with travel in the title. Search engines operate the same way. Pages with the search terms appearing in the HTML title tag are often assumed to be more relevant than others to the topic.

Search engines will also check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning.

Frequency is the other major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages.

Spice In The Recipe

Now it’s time to qualify the location/frequency method described above. All the major search engines follow it to some degree, in the same way cooks may follow a standard chili recipe. But cooks like to add their own secret ingredients. In the same way, search engines add spice to the location/frequency method. Nobody does it exactly the same, which is one reason why the same search on different search engines produces different results.

To begin with, some search engines index more web pages than others. Some search engines also index web pages more often than others. The result is that no search engine has the exact same collection of web pages to search through. That naturally produces differences, when comparing their results.

Search engines may also penalize pages or exclude them from the index, if they detect search engine “spamming.” An example is when a word is repeated hundreds of times on a page, to increase the frequency and propel the page higher in the listings. Search engines watch for common spamming methods in a variety of ways, including following up on complaints from their users.

Off The Page Factors

Crawler-based search engines have plenty of experience now with webmasters who constantly rewrite their web pages in an attempt to gain better rankings. Some sophisticated webmasters may even go to great lengths to “reverse engineer” the location/frequency systems used by a particular search engine. Because of this, all major search engines now also make use of “off the page” ranking criteria.

Off the page factors are those that a webmasters cannot easily influence. Chief among these is link analysis. By analyzing how pages link to each other, a search engine can both determine what a page is about and whether that page is deemed to be “important” and thus deserving of a ranking boost. In addition, sophisticated techniques are used to screen out attempts by webmasters to build “artificial” links designed to boost their rankings.

Another off the page factor is click-through measurement. In short, this means that a search engine may watch what results someone selects for a particular search, then eventually drop high-ranking pages that aren’t attracting clicks, while promoting lower-ranking pages that do pull in visitors. As with link analysis, systems are used to compensate for artificial links generated by eager webmasters.

Resources

This information was put together from the following sources:

‘How Search Engines Work’ – Search Engine Watch
‘Buying Your Way In: Search Engine Advertising Chart’ – Search Engine Watch
‘How Internet Search Engines Work’ – How Stuff Works
For additional information see – ‘How Web Search Engines Work’ – Webopedia

Date Created: January 2006