Search engines do NOT, in fact, “search the web” each time you submit a search. Each search engine searches its own database of words drawn from the computer code behind individual web pages. Search companies like Google send "spider" programs out to "crawl" through the internet looking for new or changed web files. The spiders collect the words and bring them back to include in the database for that company.
That means that Search Engines:
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So after the search engine finds your words, how does it list the millions of results? Why is the first one first? How did it choose the first page of ten? How does a computer figure out "relevancy?" Well, when the words from the pages are collected into the search company's database, other information about them is also collected, such as:
Anything that can be counted or given a value is fed into a formula which determines the order of the results. (Note that not everything that is potentially useful can be counted by a search engine. Many people think search engines include how many times a site is visited in their formula, but they don't have that information.)
The exact formula is proprietary to each database – Google does this differently than Bing does, and they ain’t tellin’. Why do you need to think about this? Because things like paid advertisements can influence the rankings. (Advertising will come up several times in this tutorial - it's important.) Makes it kind of difficult to know just what you’re getting, which is why you have to ultimately judge for yourself what to click on.