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Search engines are the most powerful tool in which to find information on the Internet. With Google, Yahoo, and the wide assortment of search engines available, you can search for practically anything.
After a simple search query consisting of a keyword or phrase, the search engine will sift through millions of web pages and give you the most relevant ones that match your topic. An added perk of these information juggernauts is that results come ranked so that the most relevant ones appear first. Despite this, search engines can make mistakes from time to time. Non-important pages can sneak through and you might find yourself inserting phrase after phrase to get the right combination. Overall though, search engines do their jobs well.
Consider this scenario - you are a freshman college student walking up to the librarian at the Hicks Undergraduate Library at Purdue University. You say "engineering". The librarian is probably going to look at you with a questioned face. Unlike librarians, who are a walking, talking informational source - search engines do not have the power to ask questions to crosshair the search specifically. They don't use judgment and past experience to rank web pages either like college students could. The search engine who can officially create a system like this is an automatic trailblazer in the field, but it will take plenty of time.
The million dollar question: how do search engines classify and rank web pages? For starters, they follow a concrete set of rules. Rules dictate that the location and frequency of keywords and phrases on a webpage determine a page's rank. Remember the Purdue librarian mentioned above? You've asked them to find a book for you on engineering, so their first course of action is to locate books with engineering in the title. Search engines work along the same lines. If pages contain keywords in the title, search engines will automatically trigger them as relevant. In addition, search engines look to see if keywords are near the top of the webpage, like on the headline or first couple of paragraphs. According to search engine philosophy, if a keyword appears near the beginning - the entire website must be discussing it exclusively.
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