Search engines play a massive role in the business reputation management industry, as everyone knows. They are the tool which misanthropes use to ruin peoples reputations. Similarly, they are also the conduit through which business reputation management professionals fix others’ reputations.

There is a fascinating post, pasted below, that describes how exactly a search engine works. The article covers with basics with incredibly clarity.

Long before you start to worry about actually ranking content, you need to get it into the index. And of course, to do that, your content needs to be found. In the world of information retrieval this is, appropriately enough, known as ‘discovery’. This in itself can be known as a few things including ‘data mining’ ‘knowledge discovery’ and so on. Regardless of the terminology, I thought it would be fun to get back to basics and look at how search engines might go about it…

The whole article is great and very instructive.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-search-engines-find-your-content/16809/