How Do Search Engine Works?

Which is the most popular search engine in the world? Google. Right!

There are few more search engines are like Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex etc. But yes Google capture the largest market cap.

Now, How many of you know how these search engine works? Nobody can tell.

Let me give the answer. Here we will see How Search Engine Works?

Before proceeding ahead first know what is Search Engine?

Definition

A Search Engine is a software program that helps people find the information they are looking for online using keywords or phrases. The engine provides a list of results that best match what the user is trying to find.

Search engines allow users to search the internet for content using keywords. When a user enters a query into a search engine, a search engine results page (SERP) is returned with a huge amount of results by it ranking, in order of their relevance.

Today, there are many different search engines available on the Internet, each with its own abilities and features. The most popular and well-known search engine is Google. Other popular search engines include Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, AOL, Ask.com and DuckDuckGo.

Here we will talk about Google’s working process.

How do search engines work?

Search engines work through three primary functions:

1. Crawling
2. Indexing
3. Ranking

1. Crawling

Google searches the web with automated programs called crawlers, spiders, bots. The job of crawlers is to scan the Internet and find the servers hosting websites and copy the entire website’s content and store it in the giant database.

They visit each website and by using different techniques, they try to find out how many pages they have, whether it is text content, images, videos or any other format.

The crawlers do this task continuously and they also keep track of changes made to a website so that they know when new pages are added or deleted, when links are updated, etc.

The new links are followed next to find many interconnected documents, also revisiting the previous sites to check for newly made changes. A never-ending process. Sometimes the “crawlers” give up, if the actual content is hidden many clicks away from the homepage.

2. Indexing

Indexing is the process of organizing the masses of data and pages so they can be searched quickly for relevant results to your search query. Once a crawler crawls a website then search engines need to decide how to organize the information.

The indexing process is when search engine review website data for positive or negative ranking signals and store it in the carefully organized databases that hold the billions of webpages they are monitoring on the web.

The index is stored in vast data centers where search engine robots can quickly and easily access it to update information about the websites or to retrieve an answer for a user’s search query.

Read Article – What is SEO: A Basic Knowledge

3. Ranking

Once pages are crawled and indexed, they are eligible to be served in a search engines results page (SERP). SERPs are what you get right after you type a query into a search engine. The relevant results listed on a SERP are essentially ranked – #1 get listed at the top of the page.

Search engines determine rankings by many factors. Considerations include relevancy, quality, location, authority etc. Search Engine scan their index, looking at how relevant each website is to a search phrase while taking into consideration the site’s popularity and reputation.

Popular websites will rank higher in searches than websites that receive little or no traffic. Relevance and popularity are the most important factors to be considered by these search engines to provide satisfactory performance.

Search engines often change their algorithms (the programs that rank the results) to improve user experience. They aim to understand how users search and give them the best answer to their query.

Read Article – Why Is SEO Important For Every Website?

Conclusion

Understanding how search engines work is the first step towards ranking higher in Google and getting more traffic. Sending the right signals to search engines guarantees that your pages appear in results pages relevant to your business. Understanding how these algorithms and features work is fundamental to making sure your content gets seen on Google. It will also help you understand the results you see when you perform searches yourself.