How search engine works step by step
While it may seem magical, a search engine is a computer program designed to help us navigate the endless information on the World Wide Web. The most popular search engines in the world are Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Baidu, the leading search engine in China. Since many of us use search engines in daily life, these few companies and the systems they have created possess a significant amount of power. It could even be said that they rule the world. And here’s why.
Think of a search engine like the library and the web’s leading librarian. Search engines not only crawl, index and crawl all the websites in the world, they also take care of helping us find the right website when we enter a keyword or “query” into their search tool. This is what you might call “googling” something. We trust your answers without thinking too much about how you get your results. But how do they work?
You See X, Google sees Y
When search engines see websites, they don’t see them exactly like humans do. Google and his friends have developed elaborate programs to try to mimic human behavior as closely as possible, but in the end, search engines are computers, not people.
When you see a beautiful website filled with colors, images, fonts, and buttons, search engines look behind the scenes at the site’s code. Code pages are known as “documents” and to most humans they seem incomprehensible. However, search engines can make sense of this data and use it to understand what a website is about.
By examining the code, they can distinguish between large, bold text titles or small fonts that describe the details of a business. They can tell which buttons are clickable and which pages on your site are interconnected. However, they cannot absorb or make sense of images and images the way humans do. Instead, search engines rely on “alt text” to figure out what is displayed in any given image.
From research to SERPs
Using complex algorithms that are constantly improving, search engines actually perform three main tasks: crawling, indexing and retrieving data.
- crawl
Search engines send automated computer programs known as “spiders” or “bots” to crawl the more than 30 billion web pages on the Internet and record their information. Links contained within any web page lead the bot to subsequent destinations. The process never ends, not only because new websites are constantly being added, but also because bots continually return to previously crawled websites for new content, new links, and other updates. - Indexing
What do search engines do with all the information they collect while their bots crawl the web? They store it in carefully organized databases that contain the billions of web pages they are monitoring on the web. This index is stored in vast data centers where search engine robots can quickly and easily access it to update information on websites or to retrieve it. an answer to a user’s search query.
- Data recovery
The third function of a search engine is probably the one you are most familiar with. When a user enters a query, the search engine checks its website database and retrieves a list of web pages relevant to the query. Furthermore, the search engine also ranks these results in order of relevance. And everything is done in less than a second. Quite remarkable, right?
When you search for something online, Google doesn’t crawl the entire World Wide Web, but rather searches your own library or website index. By providing your website with excellent SEO, you can make sure that Google bots know when your website is a relevant result for someone’s search.
Note:
“A single Google query uses 1000 computers in 0.2 seconds to get an answer.” – Internet statistics in real time
Nobody knows how search engines determine which websites to select from their database and present them in a SERP. The algorithm is intentionally kept secret in an effort to keep the web in a fair place. If Google and other search engines were to eliminate the algorithm behind their retrieval techniques, webmasters could likely hack the system and manipulate the results to make their websites appear higher in searches. Although the details of the search algorithm are kept secret, we have a good understanding of what factors can affect a site’s ranking; this is what it means to give your site good SEO.
Understanding the classifications
Google’s algorithm relies on more than 200 parameters to determine which websites they believe are most relevant to a given query. They analyze their index and look at the relevance of each website to a search phrase and at the same time take into account the popularity and reputation of the site. Popular websites will rank higher in searches than websites that get little or no traffic.
Again, although the exact algorithms used by search engines are kept secret, experts agree that the following elements have an impact on a website’s ranking in searches. These elements form the basis of SEO.
Domain – Was the user’s search phrase found in a website’s domain name?
Titles and descriptions: Is the user’s search phrase found in the titles and descriptions of the website pages?
Keyword frequency – How often is the user’s search phrase found in website content or as image alt text?
Freshness – How often and by what date was the website updated?
Backlinks – How many other websites have links to the site?
Link quality: what is the reputation of the sites linking to the site? Are they spam or professional and useful?
Engagement: How many people click on the website in search results and how much time do they spend on the website?
Bounce Rate: How many people click on the website and leave it immediately? A high bounce rate will negatively affect website ranking.
Brand reputation – How often is the brand, company or site domain mentioned in the news and in the media?
Social media – How often do people mention the website in tweets, Google+ and Facebook posts?
Using a combination of these and many other factors, search engines strive to provide each user with a list of web pages that could respond to their request.
Buried treasures: why are links important?
Search engines are not foolproof and they don’t find all sites on the web. There are over a billion websites on the internet, and crawlers do their best to find and index them all. But search engines find websites by following links – if a website isn’t linked from other pages on the web, bots have a hard time finding and indexing it. To make sure your website isn’t overlooked, submit your sitemap to Google. You also want to try getting links from other websites. These are called “backlinks” and can help you avoid creating an attractive website that search engines never find. Find out more about getting backlinks here.
