You go to the search bar, type a question, and get a long list of websites that will help you in seconds. How? Is it magic? It’s not magic, but it’s a process where the search engine bots hunt for information and provide it to you!
Today, we’ll get to know the process behind how search engines work– the step-by-step process that is easy to understand. So, let’s go deep into it and get to know all the interesting things!
Step 1: Crawling
Search engines are like a huge library with many special bots present to help people find what they want. These bots are called crawlers and what they do is, go to different new and existing pages and understand the data provided.
They follow the links available on the web page just like we click on links to go to some other relevant and new web page. This way, the crawlers collect the information of all they’ve gone through.
Step 2: Indexing
After going through web pages and collecting them, it organizes those web pages. A great index is created, and sort things out. The index keeps all the information about each web page, the links and all the important details present.
Step 3: Understanding Your Search
When a user types a query in the search bar, the search engines try to understand what they’re looking for – their search intent. It does it by understanding and analyzing the words, phrases, language and synonyms used in the search bar. This helps in understanding the search intent behind the query.
Step 4: Ranking
Here’s where it’s most fun! There are some algorithms – a way to say out loud the rules by which the ranks of webpages are decided. The relevancy matters the most. On the other hand, the algorithm includes many factors which decide the ranks of the website. The factors are content freshness, Content relevancy, optimisation and trustworthiness of your website.
Step 5: Serving Up the Results
After crawling, indexing and ranking, it’s time to serve the results! The list of relevant and ranked webpages is presented that are relevant to your search query. Usually, the first few results fulfill your needs and save you tons of time!
It’s an Ongoing Process!
The internet is changing constantly, and new websites pop up all the time. So, the work done for search engines is never enough. You need to constantly put in effort. The crawlers find new information, update the index constantly and algorithms change and update constantly to provide better results.
So, next time you search on the internet, always remember the work done by crawlers to provide you with the relevant and high-quality results. So, keep all of it in mind and go ahead to discover all and satisfy your curiosity!
