Ever wonder about what are search engines and how to search engines work to crawl, index, and rank WebPages? 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?
How do search engines 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. These are the reasons that it receives over 5.6 billion searches in a single day. Pretty enough to stand alone at the top!
How does Google Search engine Work?
Google has created software programs known as spiders or crawlers. 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 those pages are then stored across thousands of machines.
Now suppose you want to find out the height of the Eiffel Tower. You write the following query in Google “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 it all by considering many factors which are approx. 200 in number.
For example;
how many times does this page contain your keywords?
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 those factors together to decide each page’s overall score and send back the search results. And all this happens in less than half a second. And in this case, you will get the search result that the height of the Eiffel Tower is 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 shows links to similar pages and related searches at the end of the page which people might try next. And sometimes at the top and bottom of the page, Google may show some Ads (which are managed separately by a platform known as 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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