How Does Search Engine Work: Matching all the terms a user enters on a search bar and presenting results relevant to the search query can seem like a huge task. To understand how this works, let us take a quick look into the elements that make everything happen:
Search Index –
This is a digital library of all the information gathered by search engines through a process called crawling. It is from this library that search engines find the results to display to the users.
Search Algorithms –
These are intrinsically crafted programs that not only match the search queries within the search index but also rank the results based on various ranking factors.
What is the Use of Search Engine Algorithms?
Search engine algorithms work intensively on analyzing the search index and finding the most relevant and high-quality results for the users’ search queries.
If you’re wondering how Google search works, algorithms are what make it happen. For each search query, the job of a search engine is to explore Google’s entire search index and find the most relevant indexed web pages that can provide the desired results for the user.
The user then clicks on one of the results presented. This action is recorded by these algorithms along with the remaining activities performed by the users after clicking on the result page. This recording is then fed into the future learning of the search engines’ algorithms, which helps them in better deciding the best rankings to give to a webpage/website.
Crawling (Finding)
This is the first step for search engines to use web crawlers to find web pages on the World Wide Web. A web crawler is a program used by Google to create an index. It is designed for crawling, where crawlers search the web and store information about visited web pages in the form of an index.
So search engines have web crawlers or spiders that crawl, and the crawler’s job is to visit and read web pages and follow links to other web pages on the site. Every time a crawler visits a web page, it makes a copy of the page and adds the URL to the index. After adding the URL, visit the website regularly every month or two to check for any updates or changes.
Indexing (Organizing)
During this phase, a copy of the web page created by the crawler while crawling is returned to the search engine and stored in the data center. Crawlers use these copies to build indexes for search engines. Each web page that appears in a search engine’s list is crawled and added to an index by a web crawler. Your website should only be included in the index and then appear on search engine pages.
We can say that the index is like a huge book that contains a copy of each web page found by the crawler. If any webpage changes, the crawler updates the book with new content.
The index, therefore, contains the URLs of the various websites visited by the crawler and the information collected by the crawler. This information is used by search engines to provide users with relevant answers to their queries. If a page has not been added to the index, it will not be available to users. Indexing is an ongoing process. Crawlers keep visiting her website to find new data.
Ranking (Serving)
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 gets listed at the top of the page (Often underneath ads) followed by the other pages, in ascending order.
Search engines determine rankings by many factors. Considerations include relevancy, quality, location, authority, and device to name a few. Decoding ranking factors and determining which your website needs to improve is the basis of search engine optimization (SEO).
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