Search engines are software systems that search the World Wide Web for specific information specified in a textual web search query. Typically, the search engine displays a list of results to the user and ranks them by relevance. The information may include web pages, images, videos, audio files and other types of documents.

In order to provide the best search experience, search engines must understand the meaning of a user’s query. This is accomplished through a number of techniques that help the search engine to recognize and interpret a user’s words and phrases.

These techniques range from analyzing the content of a webpage to calculating how much a page has been linked to by other websites. Each of these steps affects the search engine’s ranking algorithms and determines how well a site will show up in a search result.

Linking to other sites has a strong effect on search engine rankings. As such, many SEO firms have begun to use a variety of strategies in order to ensure that their website has plenty of links from high-quality websites.

For example, they might hire a team of writers to write articles that discuss the topic of the search. They might also add keywords and phrases to the article’s title, body and other parts of the text in order to encourage searchers to click on it.

The goal of these efforts is to ensure that the website appears at the top of the search engine results. The search engine will then return a list of pages that are most relevant to the query, usually in a series of web page results, sometimes called “search engine results pages” (SERPs).

While SEO experts often focus on Google’s market share, Bing and Yahoo both play an important role in the Internet. Their market shares vary from country to country and their competition is high, making it essential that all websites be optimized for these search engines.

Some search engines allow you to define your search terms in very specific ways, but not all do. Adding quotation marks (” “) around your search terms narrows the results and increases your chances of finding exactly what you want.

However, be sure not to truncate your search words or you may end up with irrelevant results. This technique may also be useful for Finnish users who spell different word endings differently from English speakers.

Using capital letters used to be a way to narrow your search and focus on proper nouns, but it no longer works as effectively. Most search engines ignore capitals, regardless of where they appear in a word.

Another common search engine technique is to put quotes around certain words or phrases, which can narrow your results even more. This is particularly useful if you’re trying to find information on something very specific.

Some search engines will even let you add a plus (+) sign to a keyword to ensure that only documents containing this phrase will show up in your results. This is especially helpful if you’re searching for recipes, and you want only those with sugar in them.