Toronto Search Engines differ from each other in the way they operate or the algorithm they are built upon. They however perform the following basic tasks:

- They search the Internet looking for information based on a few keywords.

- They build an indexed database of the information they find along with a pointer to the location where the information was found.

- Using this indexed database, they allow users to search for their key terms and phrases.

In the early days of the Internet, Search Engines indexed a few thousand pages and received only a few hits everyday. In the present day, Toronto Search Engines index hundreds of million pages and receive a million or more hits everyday.

What is Crawling?

In order to let you know where a file or document is, Toronto Search Engines have to locate this file on the web. This process of locating the information on the web is achieved through programs known as spiders or crawlers.

In order to build and maintain a usable database, the program has to look and analyze a lot of web pages. The spider starts its travel from the heavily used servers. The spider will begin with a popular site, locating and indexing the contents on its pages. It will then travel to all links found on this website. In this way, the spider crawls all over the web, locating and indexing all information it finds.

Indexing

Once the Toronto Search Engines have completed the task of locating the information it has to be indexed and stored in a database in such a way that it is accessible to the users. There are 2 key aspects to this.

-The information stored with the data

-The method by which the information is indexed

In the simplest case, Toronto Search Engines could just store the keyword and the URL where the keyword was found. This would highly limit the use of Toronto Search Engines because there would be no way to tell whether the keyword was used once or many times, if the keyword was relevant to the website, if the website in question had links to other websites etc.

To make for more useful results, most Toronto Search Engines store more than just the word and URL. They store the number of times a keyword appears on a page. The engine assigns a weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the meta tags or in the title of the page. Toronto Search Engines employ different algorithms to rank websites.

An index has a single purpose. It allows information to be found as quickly as possible. There are quite a few in which Toronto Search Engines build indexes, the most popular method being use of hash tables.