Search Engines, SEO

How Do Search Engines Work?

At present, we all are using search engines on a regular basis. If we have a URL of the website, we can directly reach to the website. But what if we do not have the URL, in that case, we will have to make use of the search engines for getting the desired information. That information can be in the form of an image, a pdf file, videos, and the website. One of the most popular search engines which we all are using at present is Google Search Engine. These search engines have made things easier for us as we can search for anything online with ease. But have you ever wondered how these search engines work? Or how they provide us the searches based on our queries?

These days, almost every business is online, as it is important for the growth of the business. And all these businesses also depend highly on these search engines, be it an E-commerce business, or any consulting firm business, or the blogger, and vloggers, they all need these search engines. We do understand that it is a bit confusing for you all to understand the complete algorithm of how search engines work. But you should be aware of the basics of how a search engine works, as all the search engines work on almost the same algorithm. So, let’s understand a few basic things about the search engines and how they work and give us all the searches.

The search engine basically works on three functions. The three functions are crawling, indexing, and algorithm. These are the basic functions on which a search engine is dependent. However, other than these 3 basic functions, there is a lot that is required for getting the search results.

Crawling

The first step in the process of how a search engine works is known as Crawling. Crawling is a kind of process for searching or discovering. In this process, the search engines, make use of spiders or crawlers or the search engine robots to find the latest, updated, and relevant content. When a user searches something on the search engine, the crawler helps in finding out the content that is being published on the web to provide the user with the relevant search result. The web crawler or the spiders crawl a web page repeatedly to check if there is any new or updated information available. Web Crawlers gathers all the link they get on the page and keeps performing the task. You will be surprised to know that these web crawlers can read more than 100 or 1000 pages per second.

Indexing

The web crawler when crawls all the web pages, it stores the copy that is made during the crawling process in the data center. There are many data centers around the world and every search engine has dozens of data centers. These search engines guard their data center very properly. These data centers are very huge and they store all the copies of those webpages which the crawlers have made. In simple words, we can say that the Indexing is basically related to storing of the content along with organizing the content which a crawler found during the crawling process. And these contents are the webpages copies which the crawlers have read n number of times. The content that is stored in the index is nothing but the result of the query that has been made by the user and it will be displayed by the search engine. Indexing is basically done for the purpose of displaying the search results quickly for the search query that is been made. And there are not just a few contents that are stored in the data center during indexing, there is a huge content that is being stored and organized during this process.

Algorithm

Many people also call this function of the search engine as ranking. So, the algorithm is not a very simple process, and it is a lengthy process. As the crawling and indexing is done, and the search engines have huge copies of web pages, so these search engines need to display the relevant result in the order. When we say that they need to be displayed in order, we mean that these copies of web pages should be ranked in proper order according to the search query made by the user. You all would have heard about the term Search Engine Optimization, and this plays a very crucial role in the algorithm process. This is one of the reasons why most of the sites these days are focusing a lot on improving SEO. It is believed that the higher a web page is placed or is ranked in the search engine for the search query that was made, the more relevant it is according to the query. The better the algorithm will be of any search engine, the more relevant result they will provide of the search query.

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