Searching Web Pages
Query processing is the activities of analyzing a query and comparing it to the indexes to find relevant items.
A user enters a keyword (or keywords along with Boolean modifiers such as “and,” “or,” and “not”) into a search engine, which then scans indexed web pages for the keywords.
Ranking the Search-Result Web Pages
To determine in which order to display pages to users, the engine uses an algorithm to rank pages that contain the keywords.
Search engines use the locations and frequencies of keywords on a web pages to rank the page.
Location:
Pages with keywords appearing in the title or near the top of a web page are assumed to be more relevant than others to the topic.
Frequency:
A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a page.
Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other pages.