Search Engines are the organizing kings of the Internet. In the chaos of information, the search engine (whichever you choose) helps you find web sites according to the terms you suggest. Of course, your end is quite simple. The job of the search engine is, in comparison, rather complex. In fact, here are some Google facts that may help put the task of a search engine in perspective.

• Google employs more than 50 PhD level software engineers.
• It takes 10,000 servers to keep Google running.
• Google indexes BILLIONS, yes with a b, of web pages.
• The Google data center is said to require 103 megawatts of electricity (enough to power 82,000 homes, or a city the size of Tacoma, WA); this power requirement is offset by solar panels on Google’s buildings.

With all that said, what is it that the software actually does? Enter GoogleBot. Ben Rathbone, said of GoogleBot in 2005 when he was at Google’s Hardward Operations:

I pondered the question: what does Google do? The grossly simplified answer that I came up with is Google connects the world with the Internet.

It all snapped into place: the idea of a robot, connecting a world with the Internet, with wires, that connect to big cabinets of computers. It was not hard then to make the leap to representing the Internet as a world, or globe, made up of pages.

GoogleBot is a program that visits your website, reads each page, and follow the links within your site. All words used on the page(s) can later be used for finding your page when any combination of the words is used in a search. This function is called “crawling” or “spidering,” in reference to the way the so called robot finds its way through your website.

After reading the words contained in your page, the information is sent to the analyzing component of the software. Words and phrases are evaluated and readied for indexing. Once submitting your site to Google, you won’t need to have it re-crawled until the next Google Update.

The video instant previews show you several frames from a video and may even play the video preview when you mouse over the thumbnail image.

How does it work? Search Google or Google Video search and look for a video result, hover your mouse, or click on the magnifying glass preview icon. A drop down of four frames may be displayed on the right side of the icon. By placing your mouse pointer over the video preview frames, the video selection may begin to play on your screen.

The benefit? As explained by Google’s Daniel M. Russell: “REALLY handy when the video results are more diverse, and you can?t really tell them apart except by clicking though to the result.”

Some users have criticized Google for allowing non useful articles to appear at the top of search results. However, the algorithm change addresses this problem.

Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, and Matt Cutts, who leads Google’s spam-fighting team, wrote in a recent company blog post: “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites ? sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other Web sites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites ? sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

Google has stated it makes around 500 changes to its algorithm a year, but most are so small the company doesn’t announce them. This change will affect roughly 12% of search queries, Google said, so it is big enough to significantly change the results people see.

To what can this increase be attributed? Is Bing the better search engine? According to Hitwise Google’s “success rate” ? the percentage of times users click on links yielded by searches ? is 65 percent, versus 82 percent for Bing.

However, Google remains, by far, the most popular search engine, with close to 70 percent of the market.

Bing executive Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Online Services Division, blogged about the accusation, remarking that, “We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop.” In the same blog, he accused Google of a “cloak and dagger click fraud” scheme to discredit Bing’s search practices.

And what of this ‘click fraud'; an attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers and produce bogus search results? Earlier this week, Search Engine Land wrote about a Google experiment that ended up showing Bing’s results for a few obscure queries mirror those of Google’s. Microsoft, shocked into going on the defensive, said it uses tools that monitor the search practices of users who opt in anonymously. That process happened to cause some Bing results to apparently mimic Google’s, Microsoft said.

Mehdi described Google’s “experiment” as rigged to manipulate Bing search results through said click fraud.

So, what does this prove? As stated succinctly at the Microsoft blog, “Nothing anyone in the industry doesn’t already know. As we have said before and again in this post, we use click stream optionally provided by consumers in an anonymous fashion as one of 1,000 signals to try and determine whether a site might make sense to be in our index.”

Cutts also reminded users of the following principles which apply to Google search results: Google takes action against sites that violate its quality guidelines, regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google, displaying Google ads does not help a site’s rankings in Google, and buying Google ads does not increase a site’s rankings in Google’s search results.

Cutts also addressed the more recent problem of content farms, which consist mostly of what he described as “spammy or low-quality content,” assuring users that Google is as committed to the war on spam as ever.

Even that the website is still very young and their search results are not always as relevant as one can expect, Blekko offers already few interesting features. Under a title of each result there are few links: tag | seo links cache ip chatter | spam. By clicking a link SEO we can see many interesting information about the website. The information can be very useful for search marketing specialists.

According to Google, the new feature, because it shows results before we finish typing, can save 2-5 seconds per search.

Under that deal between those two companies, Microsoft provides the back-end crawling, listing, and ranking technologies that generate search results, while Yahoo is responsible for presenting those results on search pages.