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Excerpt: Introduction How can a search engine determine whether two documents are similar? In our post on search engine operation we looked at how search engines can retrieve information on documents given a query string. Vector methods are also used to decide whether documents are related. Example Let’s make this a concrete example. Say we have three toy documents which have been parsed into their keywords so that all the unimportant word have been removed. For example, commonly occurring words such as: as, of, the, … and so on are removed. We might be left with: document 1 = {news, information, campaign, raise, awareness} document 2…

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Excerpt: When we type a query into a search engine such as Google, how many of us think about what goes on behind the scenes? Any SEO specialist ought to have a basic understanding of how your query gets transformed into a list of results. In the early days of the web, a search engine consisted of a list of a few thousand sites. There were so few websites that it was enough just to list pages of all the sites found by a simple crawler. With the explosion in the number of websites after 1994, the task of indexing the web…