How do Search Engines Work?

Since we know “What are Search Engine?” Now let’s have a closer look at the elements involved in its working:

Search engines are generally work on three parts that are Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking

1. Crawling: Search engines have a number of computer programs that are responsible for finding information that is publicly available on the internet. The crawler scans the web and creates a list of all available websites. Then they visit each website and by reading HTML code they try to understand the structure of the page, the type of the content, the meaning of the content, and when it was created or updated. Why crawling is important? Your first concern when optimizing your website for search engines is to make sure that they can access it correctly. If crawler cannot find your content you won’t get any ranking or search engine traffic.

2. Indexing: Information identified by the crawler needs to be organized, Sorted, and Stored so that it can be processed later by the ranking algorithm. Search engines don’t store all the information in your index, but they keep things like the Title and description of the page, The type of content, Associated keywords Number of incoming and outgoing links, and a lot of other parameters that are needed by the ranking algorithm. Why indexing is important? Because if your website is not in their index it will not appear for any searches this also means that if you have any pages indexed you have more chances of appearing in the search results for a related query.

3. Ranking: Ranking is the position by which your website is listed in any Search Engine. There is following three steps in which how ranking works .

• Step 1: Analyze user query – This step is to understand what kind of information the user is looking for. To do that analyze the user’s query by breaking it down into a number of meaningful keywords. A keyword is a word that has a specific meaning and purpose, for example when you type how to make a chocolate cupcake search engines know that you are looking for specific information so the results will contain recipes and step-by-step instructions. They can also understand the meaning of how to change a light bulb is the same as how to replace a light bulb search engines are clever enough to interpret spelling mistakes also.
• Step 2: Finding matching pages – This step is to look into their index and find the best matching pages, for example, if you search dark wallpaper then it gives you the result of images, not text.
• Step 3: Present the results to the users – A typical search results page includes ten organic results in most cases it is enriched with other elements like paid Ads, direct answers for specific queries, etc.

Search engines are the software program that provides information according to the user query. It finds various websites or web pages that are available on the internet and gives related results according to the search. To rank well on a Search Engine, it’s important to know What are Search engines and how they work.