Search engines are engineering before they are marketing. The people who optimize search engines are the engineers who build them.
Topics in this field
Learning to rankThe system is trained on the behaviour it caused.Snippet generationIt is written by a machine, from your text, for a query you did not know about.Query expansionYou are answering a question that was quietly edited before it reached you.Relevance feedbackAbsence produces no signal.Query performance predictionA page of ten results looks the same whether the answer exists or not.Passage retrievalYour page is being read in fragments by a system that never sees the whole.Mean average precisionA score of 0.87 tells you how well the ranking matched a list somebody wrote down.Vector space modelIf the web never described your case, the vector for it is somebody else's.Inverted indexThe web is the part of knowledge that somebody bothered to publish and a crawler managed to reach.Precision and recallThe two measures behind every search evaluation, what they cannot see, and who decided what counts as relevant.
These pages state what each mechanism does, and then the part that matters to anyone who publishes on the web.
