As the Internet widely expands, so does the businesses on-line. To facilitate in gaining more profit, new technologies, and marketing and advertising strategies have come about. One of these is the use of pay per click (PPC), which uses search engines, advertising networks, and content websites or blogs.

Particularly, a PPC search engine enables a user to bid on keywords that relate to his or her web site. The web site with the highest bidder for a particular keyword will also be ranked highest, placing his or her web site as the first on the listing.

A PPC search engine has become an integrated part of search engine optimization. The auction principle serves as its basis, which means that the value of the amount being bid is a deciding factor for the web site's ranking.

You might ask, 'how does a PPC search engine gather information'? Basically, a search engine has three major elements. These are the spider, the index, and the software. Each of these has its own functions. The spider, also known as a web crawler or robot, is an automated program. Its primary function is to read web pages and follow any links to other pages within a web site, which is why the term spidered or crawled was coined. The index, on the other hand, is similar to that of a giant catalog or inventory of web sites containing a copy of each web page and file that the spider finds. Whenever a web page changes, the catalog is updated with the new information as well.

The software utilized to run the search engine with is designed to sift through billions of pages stored in its index to find matches to a search query and rank them accordingly. Collaboratively, the spider, the index and the software produce what we now call the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Once a search query is entered, the search engine analyzes and searches the index for the pages it considers relevant to the query. It further calculates the order each of the web sites from a shortlist of the relevant pages are to be presented to the user based on algorithmic factors. These factors may be the user's location and possibly even his or her search history.

An effective PPC search engine delivers appropriate, relevant, information-rich sites that will satisfy users, first time round, well establishing a connection between consumers and producers of information, products, and services efficiently. This means that not only advertisers get what they want but also web users.