Search engines are our primary method for browsing the web. Search engines allow us to search the internet for anything and everything with a simple keyword. Although the market is dominated by a few, there are many search engines that are available to us.
Here is the 1,2,3 of how search engines work:
- CRAWLING
Most search engines are crawler-based. This mean that spiders or spiderbots, “crawl” the web actively seeking pages to add to their index. They may do this every few days, so it is possible for content to be out-of-date until they crawl your website again. With this crawler-based software, search engines work by filling a database, or index, of billions of web pages. When visiting websites, besides taking note of their number of pages, they also note whether it is text content, images, videos, or any other format. They continuously crawl so that they keep track of changes made to websites so that they know when new pages are added or deleted, and when links are updated, etc.
- INDEXING
The search engine will try to understand and categorise the content on a web page through ‘keywords’. Information identified by the crawlers get organised, sorted, and stored so that it can be processed by the search engine algorithms before made available to users. This process is called Indexing.
- RANKING
Search results are ranked based on algorithms, by different factors including keyword density, speed, quality, and links. The search engine’s aim is to provide the most relevant results. When we enter a query into a search engine, a search engine results page (SERP) is returned, ranking the found pages in order of their relevance. How this ranking is done differs across search engines.
Search engines often change their algorithms to improve user experience. They aim to understand how users search and give them the best answer to their query. This means giving priority to the highest quality and most relevant pages.
Life might not have all the answers, but your search engine certainly will.
