How do Search Engines work?

A search engine is an online tool that searches for results in its database based on the search query or the keyword submitted by the internet user. The results which are displayed are the websites that equally match the searched keyword.

Search engines find the results in their database, sort them, and make an ordered list of these results based on the search algorithm. This list is generally called the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

So if we talk in a simple language, Google is a Search Engine that is widely used all over the world. Similarly, there are several search engines used, for example, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.

I hope now you have an idea about Search engines, but do you know how it works?

So here in this article, let us understand how search engines work.

How do search engines work?

Search engines work by crawling hundreds of billions of pages using their own web crawlers. These web crawlers are commonly referred to as search engine bots or spiders. A search engine navigates the web by downloading web pages and following links on these pages to discover new pages that have been made available.

There may be some differences in how the search engines work but the fundamentals remain the same. Each of them has to do the following tasks:

• Crawling

Crawling which is also known as spidering is when Google or another search engine sends a bot to a web page or web post and “read” the page. Don’t let this be confused with having that page being indexed. Crawling is the first part of having a search engine recognize your page and show it in search results. Search engines have their own crawlers, small bots that scan websites on the world wide web. These little bots scan all sections, folders, sub pages, content, everything they can find on the website. Crawling is based on finding hypertext links that refer to other websites. By parsing these links, the bots are able to recursively find new sources to crawl. 

• Indexing

Once the bots crawl the data, it’s time for indexing. The index is basically an online library of websites.

Your website has to be indexed in order to be displayed on the search engine results page. Keep in mind that indexing is a constant process. Crawlers come back to each website to detect new data.

When someone performs a search, search engines scour their index for highly relevant content and then order that content in the hopes of solving the searcher’s query. This ordering of search results by relevance is known as ranking. In general, you can assume that the higher a website is ranked, the more relevant the search engine believes that the site is to the query.

It’s possible to block search engine crawlers from part or all of your site or instruct search engines to avoid storing certain pages in their index. While there can be reasons for doing this, if you want your content found by searchers, you have to first make sure it’s accessible to crawlers and is indexable. 

• Creating results

Search engines create the results once the user submits a search query. It’s a process of checking the query against all website records in the index. Based on the algorithm, the search engine picks the best results and creates an ordered list.

Search results are highly specific and dynamic. It’s impossible to predict when and how your site will appear to each individual searcher. The best approach is to send strong relevance signals to search engines through keyword research, technical SEO, and content strategy.