Search Engine Indexing

Question 1

What is a search engine?

Answer 1

Software that is used to locate resources, usually on the internet, based on a user search query

Question 2

What do search engines rely on/use?

Answer 2

On their indexes of webpages to locate resources

Question 3

What is the index of webpages that search engines use?

Answer 3

A database which has data gathered by a search engine

Question 4

What is search engine indexing

Answer 4

The process of gathering, building and storing data in the search engine index.

Question 5

Why do we use a search engine?

Answer 5

• makes finding resources easier
• doesn’t check every document
• it is very fast and quite accurate

Question 6

Why does the search engine index need to be constantly updated?

Answer 6

To avoid broken links, add new webpages and websites and have obsolete websites removed

Question 7

What programs do search engines use to create the index?

Answer 7

Spiders or crawlers

Question 8

What do spiders/crawlers do?

Answer 8

Automatically travel the world wide web and index found words, map out links between pages in order to build up the index database.

Question 9

What do spiders/crawlers usually add to database and look at when travelling.

Answer 9

• URLs
• Titles of web pages
• Meta tags
• Content
• Links to other sites

Question 10

What is a meta tag?

Answer 10

A tag which adds extra keywords or descriptions to a webpage, while keeping them hidden within the HTML code. These are defined within the tag on the html document.

Question 11

What do search engines look through when a query is provided?

Answer 11

Their index to match the input. These use algorithms to determine which ones are the best results.

Question 12

Who uses the PageRank algorithm?

Answer 12

Google

Question 13

What is the page rank algorithm?

Answer 13

code which is used to compile and rank results of a search query. The websites are ordered based on importance, which is determined by the amount of back links and their quality(page rank of connected website).

Question 14

What assumption does the pagerank algorithm work upon?

Answer 14

That a website’s or webpage’s importance is determined by the amount of inbound links from other websites/webpages.

Question 15

What is a back link?

Answer 15

An inbound link from another site

Question 16

What is the equation for the page rank algorithm?

Answer 16

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/c(t1))………………………..

Question 17

What is PR(A)?

Answer 17

The resultant page rank of site a

Question 18

What is d?

Answer 18

The damping factor.

Question 19

What is the damping factor?

Answer 19

a probability used to reduce a ranking of a site based on the assumption that a typical user will give up clicking on links

Question 20

What is PR(t1)?

Answer 20

the page rank of linked site to a (an inbound site)

Question 21

what is C(t1) ?

Answer 21

the totaL number of outbound pages from page t1

Question 22

Are pageranks constantly updated?

Answer 22

Yes

Question 23

What is the damping factor between?

Answer 23

0 and 1

Question 24

What does the damping factor reduce?

Answer 24

used to reduce a ranking of a site generated by the amount of backlinks . So not the oldest or most important sites take the ranking

Question 25

Does the page rank algorithm ignore spelling mistakes?

Answer 25

Yes

Question 26

What does the page rank do, to summarise?

Answer 26

assings a rank to a page based on a query, it does so by ranking the amount of inward links

Question 27

Does the page rank algorithm have to deal with millions of results?

Answer 27

Yes