How Internet Search Engines Work

Building a Search

Searching through an index involves a user building a query and submitting it through the search engine. The query can be quite simple, a single word at minimum. Building a more complex query requires the use of Boolean operators that allow you to refine and extend the terms of the search.

The Boolean operators most often seen are:

AND - All the terms joined by "AND" must appear in the pages or documents. Some search engines substitute the operator "+" for the word AND.
OR - At least one of the terms joined by "OR" must appear in the pages or documents.
NOT - The term or terms following "NOT" must not appear in the pages or documents. Some search engines substitute the operator "-" for the word NOT.
FOLLOWED BY - One of the terms must be directly followed by the other.
NEAR - One of the terms must be within a specified number of words of the other.
Quotation Marks - The words between the quotation marks are treated as a phrase, and that phrase must be found within the document or file.

Searching for Sport

Search engines have become such an integral part of our lives that at least one organized game has evolved around this tool. In Googlewhacking, you type two words into the Google search engine in the hopes of receiving exactly one result -- a single Web page on which both of those words appear. This is a pure whack.

It's quite a difficult task -- you need to choose two completely unrelated words or else you'll get a whole lot more than one result, but with many completely unrelated words you get zero results.

If you achieve a pure whack, you can submit it to www.googlewhack.com, where it is posted in The Whack Stack (along with your name, or whatever you want to call yourself) for all to see. One pure whack currently in The Whack Stack is "ambidextrous scallywags."