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Articles on Jobseekers Advice If you would like to submit an article to Jobseekers Advice, then please feel free to contact us. We are always looking for a wide range of articles dealing with career advice, CV advice, interview advice, working abroad, employment issues, education and training and other recruitment or careers related topics. The articles can be the result of professional experience or personal insight - we are looking to offer all points of view.
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Surfing the web 5 - Search Engines by Scott Boyd OK, so now we got you online and surfing the web, how are you gonna find stuff - there's billions of web pages out there!
The answer is - Search Engines!
Search engines are companies who index websites and allow you to search their database from their website. This article will go into a bit more detail about how search engines work.
Indexing Search engines use automated programmes called "spiders" (or "bots") to visit websites and collect the information they find.
A spider will follow links in a website to more websites and index them, while following their links onto even more websites to index, and so on.
They work in much the same way as your browser does (they aren't chaotic programmes running about the web as their name suggests!). They visit the website and view the code, as your browser does. But instead of interpreting the code and displaying it as images and text (which is what your browser does), it saves the information to a database.
This database is known as the index.
Ranking When you visit a search engine such as Google and search for a particular term, the search engine will display results for that term based on certain criteria.
The algorithm (the calculation the search engine uses to determine which page ranks number 1, 2, 3.....etc in its results for a particular search phrase) is different for each search engine - they all have their own way of doing things. It is a closely guarded secret as the Web is big business these days and search engines can provide a lot of traffic to websites!
For you, the surfer, it is worthwhile to note that most search engines will change their algorithm (well *tweak* it anyway) from time to time, so searching for a particular term may yield different results from month to month.
Search engine optimisation It is possible for web designers to create pages in such a way that they rank well in the search engine results, and this process is called search engine optimisation.
It's not really important for the general surfer to learn about the ins and outs of this process, but you should be aware that the top ranked site(s) are not necessarily the best ones!
Knowing what to search for! As a surfer, it is important to understand that different phrases may produce slightly different results (even a difference spelling can produce entirely different sites).
Remember, a computer does not recognise the relationship between similar terms (well, they can to some extent, but a human must first point out the relationship and to do this for every subject area known to man is a huge task!).
So searching for "Recruitment Agencies in the UK" may produce different results than a search for "UK recruitment agencies". You and I realise that you searched for the same thing, but the search engine doesn't.
The point is that if at first you don't succeed in finding what you were looking for, then try a different way of wording your search term. Or try to refine your search.
For example, a search for "Recruitment Agencies" is very broad and unspecific. A search for "IT Recruitment Agencies in Scotland" is much more likely to offer you results that match your needs.
Regards Scott Boyd - Webmaster and Founder - Jobseekers Advice
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