Different methods are used by different search engines, but programs using the variations of the spider method have thus far proved the most effective at indexing large quantities of content and regularly updating these included pages and discovering new ones.
Spider methods refer to the search engine sending out electronic detectives referred to as spiders to find web pages and classify them. Search engines create an index of the web pages it has “spidered”. That index is in constant flux, being updated, hourly, daily, weekly and monthly depending upon the ability of the spiders to detect a new web page or a change in a previously indexed web page.
One of the most immediate goals of search engine marketing is to get the pages one wishes to drive traffic to included in the indices of the major search engines. Two years ago, Yahoo was offering results from Google’s index. This gave Google’s search technology the brand recognition that Yahoo had been building for years.
Today, these industry leaders compete for the eyes and clicks of potential consumers by building the most complete index of the web and properly determining which minuscule chunk is the one we are looking for when we enter a few choice words.
Read more: Being Search Engine Relevant