Have you ever wondered what search engines are and how they work to crawl, index and rank web pages? In this article, I will guide you in depth about How do search engines work especially for beginners. There are many search engines in the World like Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and many others available on the internet to provide information on any topic. When you have a query, you need to type in the search bar of the most popular search engine and get its answer in no time.
So, what’s happening behind the bar?
Understanding search engine algorithms: how do they work?
How did they decide to show which result will be shown and where?
This article explains all of this and explains how things work on a search engine.
So what are Search Engines
A search engine is a platform that facilitates users to discover data from the World Wide Web. Every search engine is different from others because of its distinct index and bot which positions websites and informative pages in their specific way. To date, Google is the top most popular search engine available.
Why is Google on top?
There are many reasons for its attraction, its homepage is quite simple with no ads popping on it in contrast to its opponents like Yahoo and Msn. It is user-friendly, loads in fractions of seconds, and makes available better results than others. That’s why it receives more than 5.6 billion searches per day. Pretty enough to stand alone at the top!
How Does Google Search Engine Work?
Google created a software program called Spider or Crawler. Spiders start by finding a few web pages and following the links on those pages and fetching the pages they point to and following the links on those pages and so on until they index a pretty big chunk of the web that has billions of pages. All these pages are stored on thousands of machines. Now suppose you want to find out the height of the Eiffel Tower. You Google the question “What is the height of the Eiffel Tower?” and hit enter. Afterwards, Google software searches the index to find all those pages that include the search terms i.e. Eiffel Tower and height. And in this case, there could be hundreds of thousands of results. So how does Google decide which documents are the most relevant to searcher intent? Google does all this with many things in mind. 200 in number.
For example;
How many times does this page contain your keyword?
Do the keywords appear in the title?
In the URL?
Directly adjacent?
Does the page include synonyms of those words?
Is the page from a quality website or a low-quality or spammy?
What is the page authority of that particular page?
How many outside links are pointed to it and how credible are those links?
Finally, Google combines all these factors to determine the overall score for each page and return search results. And all this happened in less than half a second. In this case, you will receive research on the height of the Eiffel Tower 300 meters. Google is committed to making useful and impartial search results very seriously. Google never accepts any sort of payment for organic results or adding a website to its index or updating a particular site index more often or improving its ranking.
In search results, each entry at Google contains a title, a URL, and a snippet of text to help people decide whether that page is the one which people are looking for. Google also displays links to similar pages and related searches at the end of the page that people will try next. Sometimes Google may place some ads at the top and bottom of the page (managed separately by a platform called Google Ads).
Google may not show any ads if they find no information which they think is relevant to the search queries. (We will discuss Google Ads in detail in later articles) In organic search results, Google shows only those pages which are highly optimized and follow the guidelines. Hope this article makes your understanding of how to Search engines Work clear and in the future when you search anything at Google, you will have an idea about what’s going on at the back end.
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