My oldest daughter, 5, is very curious. She is usually most curious when I am trying to work. Recently she overheard me describing how search engines find content to a client, and said, "Why do you work with spiders?"

And so I had to explain:

The Internet for children… how Search Engines work

Imagine the internet as a massive of spider web, with real spiders that crawl the web looking for relative information, the centered part at the middle of the spider web as your home page, the links connecting parts of the web together as internet connections that connect one web page to another, and the small connection points on the web as other relevant content on the internet.

Searching for something on the Internet is like a spider family living on a large spider web or combination of spider webs.

All of the baby spiders spend their days traveling across the web searching for flies (content).  They don’t have very good long-term memory, so when they return home each day, they tell their Mom where they found a good place to get flies (content) and she adds them to her map. 

The mother spider (Google) doesn’t do the actual scouting, but she is a great organizer and she collects the information from all of her little spiders out on the web. She then organizes it into a big map that allows each of them to find all of the different places that their siblings report back to her.

Each time one of the children report back to their mother, the map of the spider web gets more detailed and in depth and their ability to travel farther and wider across the web gets better.

On her map, Mom includes the name and address of the location and a short description of what was found there.  Using this map, all of her children could easily tell where to find food, the nearest hardware store, or whatever they might need. 

Some areas of the map become favorites of the spider family because they have the best flies. These areas are visited more often, so Mrs. Spider marks those areas of the map so she can remember that they are favorites.  She wants to be able to tell others where the best places to eat in town are.

Other areas don’t have any flies at all.  Because these areas aren’t useful to the spider family, Mrs. Spider notes that.  She doesn’t want her family to go back there regularly by mistake, then her map would have no value.

Building Your Web

How do you utilize this information to maximize your web presence? Get Found! When you first create your website, your web presence is small.  As you link to other sites on the web, your network grows, as does your web presence. 

How do you get quality links from other sites? How do you get your flies found?