Fri_Feb__8_16:00:09_PST_2019

31 The Index The index is where the spider-collected data are stored. When you perform a search on a major search engine, you are not searching the web, but the cache of the web provided by that search engine's index. Reverse Index Search engines organize their content in what is called a reverse index. A reverse index sorts web documents by words. When you search Google and it displays 1- 10 out of 143,000 websites, it means that there are approximately 143,000 web pages that either have the words from your search on them or have inbound links containing them. Also, note that search engines do not store punctuation, just words. The following is an example of a reverse index and how a typical search engine might classify content. While this is an oversimplified version of the real thing, it does illustrate the point. Imagine each of the following sentences is the content of a unique page: The dog ate the cat. The cat ate the mouse. Word Document # Position # The 1,2 1-1, 1-4, 2-1, 2-4 Dog 1 2 Ate 1,2 1-3, 2-3 Cat 1,2 1-5, 2-2 Mouse 2 5 Storing Attributes Since search engines view pages from their source code in a linear format, it is best to move JavaScript and other extraneous code to external files to help move the page copy higher in the source code. Some people also use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) or a blank table cell to place the page content ahead of the navigation. As far as how search engines evaluate what words are first, they look at how the words appear in the source code. I have not done significant testing to determine if it is worth the effort to make your unique