icon-background-square
New
New
Year 8

Search engines and results rankings

I can explain how search engines find and rank web pages.

icon-background-square
New
New
Year 8

Search engines and results rankings

I can explain how search engines find and rank web pages.

warning

These resources will be removed by end of Summer Term 2025.

Switch to our new teaching resources now - designed by teachers and leading subject experts, and tested in classrooms.

These resources were created for remote use during the pandemic and are not designed for classroom teaching.

Lesson details

Key learning points

  1. A search engine is a catalogue of web pages.
  2. Search engines ‘crawl’ through the World Wide Web.
  3. Search engines select and rank results when web searches are made.

Keywords

  • Crawl - when a search engine automatically explores websites to collect information

  • Index - a big catalogue, where search engines store web page information so they can find it later

  • Ranking - the order search results appear in, based on how useful and relevant they are

Common misconception

Search engines search the whole internet live.

Search engines use a pre-built index to deliver fast results.


To help you plan your year 8 computing lesson on: Search engines and results rankings, download all teaching resources for free and adapt to suit your pupils' needs...

It is helpful to model appropriate web searches for this lesson. Take care to preview your search results before you share them with students.
speech-bubble
Teacher tip
equipment-required

Equipment

A HTML editor is required to enable pupils to complete activities. Links to the same projects in the Raspberry Pi Code Editor are provided as one option.

copyright

Licence

This content is © Oak National Academy Limited (2025), licensed on Open Government Licence version 3.0 except where otherwise stated. See Oak's terms & conditions (Collection 2).

Lesson video

Loading...

6 Questions

Q1.
What does CSS stand for?
Correct Answer: Cascading Style Sheets
Q2.
What is inline styling?
Correct answer: applying style changes directly to an HTML element
adding styles through an external CSS file
using JavaScript to style a web page
styling multiple web pages at once
Q3.
What is a key benefit of using CSS over inline styling?
Correct answer: CSS allows centralised styling for consistency.
CSS is easier to write.
CSS cannot be overridden.
CSS does not require HTML.
Q4.
Which of the following is an example of inline styling?
<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css">
h1 { color: blue; }
Correct answer: `<h1 style="color: blue;">Heading</h1>`
<h1>Heading</h1>
Q5.
Which attribute is used to apply inline styles in HTML?
class
Correct answer: style
id
src
Q6.
Which CSS property changes the text colour?
font-size
background-color
Correct answer: color
text-align

6 Questions

Q1.
What is a search engine?
a program for creating HTML documents
a tool that styles web pages
Correct answer: a program that finds and ranks web pages
a database for storing images
Q2.
What is a common misconception about how search engines work?
Correct answer: thinking that they search the whole internet live
believing that they store web page information in an index
assuming that they rank results based on relevance
thinking that they crawl websites automatically
Q3.
Match each action to its purpose.
Correct Answer:crawl,find new web pages
tick

find new web pages

Correct Answer:index,store web page information
tick

store web page information

Correct Answer:rank,order search results
tick

order search results

Correct Answer:search,deliver relevant results to users
tick

deliver relevant results to users

Q4.
What is the purpose of crawling and indexing?
to create new web pages
Correct answer: to find and organise web pages for search results
to delete outdated web pages
to rank web pages automatically
Q5.
What determines a web page's ranking in search results?
its colour scheme
Correct answer: its relevance and usefulness
the number of images it contains
its file size
Q6.
What term describes data that provides information about a web page?
Correct Answer: metadata