The search engine then often strips out the graphical elements and saves the text from the web site. The user interface is a program that sifts through everything in the search engine's index to find sites that may be relevant, based on the keywords provided. These indexes tend to be very large. It depends on the search engine. Others rely more heavily on the content of the web site, the length of the web page, or the number of links pointing to the web page.
Some search engines use a combination of indexing methods.
For example, Hotbot weights these variables so that if your keywords appear in META tags, the site will be ranked high, but not as high as if your keywords appear in the web site title. Excite, on the other hand, highly ranks pages with a number of links pointing to the page. Some keywords can create a problem in your search. So searching for information on the children's book, Charlotte's Web , causes some problems. A search of Hotbot for the exact phrase Charlotte's Web returned 3,589 possible web sites with the first relevant site listed 56th.