Here is when search engines like Bing, Google or Yahoo! become indispensible. Without them, we would get completely lost in this vastness of online data, the amount of which gets bigger each day. Search engines kind of light our way in the dark waters of the Global network, and rescue us from getting drowned in the unexplored.

How come search engines are able to tell one thing from another and help us locate things? Here is the deal. What search engines do all day is they explore. They, so to say, crawl the Web, using search engine bots also known as crawlers for those purposes. And, they register everything that search engine bots find in their database called index. This is how they know stuff.

Now, how come they manage to provide exactly what you are looking for? Thing is they evaluate sites according to different criteria and use their findings as signals that help them group websites and return relevant search results.

What are those signals? Search engines look at how many times one and the same phrase is repeated on the webpage, whether its content is unique or stolen from some other site, how many people like the website and declare it by linking to it or sharing it on social media sites, etc.

Every search engine uses its own algorithm according to which it picks out sites it considers relevant for a particular search term. It then ranks those sites, displaying most relevant and best sites first, and least relevant and worst sites last. Therefore, if you think about it, what you see in search results is based on how search engines make up their artificial minds.

This is what I mean when I say "the power search engines have over your search". In a lot of ways, you look at the Web through search engine's eyes. And there is basically no way around it.

But, along with having substantial power over your search results, search engine also face problems. And their biggest problem is the ever growing bulk of info on the Web, and low-quality websites that want to seem nice and relevant, while in fact they are spammy and fraudulent.

Thus, search engines wage an ongoing struggle to keep their search results nice and relevant, while search engine optimizers who practice dark Web marketing arts hone their skills of search engine cheating. That is why search engines never stand still - they constantly evolve. Some search engines change their algos once a week, some do it less often. Sometimes, search engines rolls out major updates that substantially change their algos. This normally sends ripples all over the Web, and sometimes even affects relevant sites' positions in a bad way.

Thing is not all site owners and Internet marketers who want higher position in search results pages are cheaters. Most of them make really nice, relevant, helpful websites and are not trying to look what they are not. So, as search engine algos change very often, there is a continuous race between search engines and those who seek their favor - site owners, webmasters, SEOs and Web marketers.

So, if for most Internet users hitting "Search" is just a small thing, for search engines and Web marketers it's an ongoing struggle in which both parties sometimes win and sometimes lose, but the victory is never final.