How search engines work

And how you may never be found by your overseas customers

Contrary to popular belief, search engines do not scour the internet whenever someone enters a search query. Each search engine actually has its own database where it stores billions of web pages. Whenever a request is typed, they look through this database and bring forward the pages that they feel are most relevant to the phrase you typed into the search box.

To achieve this, search engines call upon three major elements: the spider, the index, and the software. Each has its own function and together they produce the search engine results pages, which are what we see every time we look up a subject on Google or Yahoo.

A search engine spider, also known as a web crawler or robot, is an automated programme that reads web pages and follows links to other pages. Spiders start their journeys with a list of pages that have previously been added to their database. As they visit these pages they find new pages through links, and bring the details of those pages back to be indexed in the database. As such, one could refer to a spider as feeding an evolving index.

An index is a giant database of all the web pages that the spider finds. If a web page changes, this catalogue is updated with the new information. Until a page is indexed, it will not be available to anyone using that search engine. Search engines will have one central index of the entire web, but will also have different databases for different languages in different countries. For example, the Google.fr database will contain primarily French language pages and will be different to the Google database operating in the UK. A site written only in English will stand little chance of being indexed within the databases of foreign search engines.

Software programmes are designed to sort through all the pages recorded in an index to find relevant pages and rank them in an order that it believes is most helpful. In a nutshell, whenever a user enters a query into a search box, the software analyses the wording and looks for pages containing matching text. For example, if you manufacture lawnmowers, and your site is written in English only, then it will not come up on a search query in Germany when they search for ‘Rasenmähmaschine’ (German for Lawnmower).

The aim of a search engine is to put itself in the user's shoes and bring pages that it feels are most relevant to those user’s needs, based on the language used and the subject matter requested. Therefore, the aim of web marketing is to be one step ahead of the users and understand which phrases they are most likely to type when searching for specific products or services.

In conclusion, we can see that in order to be indexed on a foreign search engine, a web site has to be written in a foreign language; and to be found by someone it has to contain the foreign text that is likely to be used when searching for your product or services.

If this whole process sounds very complicated to put together, do not worry. We take away all the technical, promotional and linguistic difficulties and provide you with a highly effective tool to push your products into overseas markets.

Please contact us today for greater details.