How A Search Engine Works: Three Steps

When you type a query in the search engine’s search bar, the search engine bots go through hundreds and millions of web pages to provide you with the most relevant answer. There are three steps that search engines work in

• Crawling

• Indexing

• Ranking

In this blog, we’ll get to know how these search engines work and serve in a detailed manner.

What Is A Search Engine

A search engine is a machine that answers every question that arises in your mind by exploring and understanding all the content available on the internet and providing you with the best of all.

But the most important thing before getting recommended to a searcher by the search engines is to show up in the search engine result pages. Understand it this way - to win a race, you need to first show up in the race.

So, to approach search engines in a better way, let’s get to know how search engine works.

How Do Search Engines Work

Search engines have 3 basic steps in which they function i.e., 

• Crawling: This happens when the user has just put a query in the search bar. The crawlers crawl over millions of pages to find relevant information.

• Indexing: This is when all the found information is stored and organized according to how much it relates to the search query, or basically like a book index, all the web pages that will show up in search results are stored in the index.

• Ranking: Here, the indexed content is ranked, given the positions that they’ll appear on the search engines.

What Is Crawling 

Crawling is the process when search engine bots go through the content available on the internet to find new and updated content. The content varies in the form of blog, image, product, video etc - the most important work is to find all the possible relevant content for the user.

These bots first find the pages that are relevant to the search query, go through them and when they find a link, they follow them. Through these links, the bots get to reach new content and add it to the index to access it whenever someone searches for it.

What Is Indexing

When the crawlers have found the information, the information is stored in a huge database. It includes all the content discovered which is good and relevant enough to be provided to the users, The process of storing it for later use is called indexing.

Ranking On Search Engines

After all the content found has been indexed, whenever a user searches for it, the search engine bot orders the web pages according to their relevance. The higher the website is ranked, the more relevant it is to the searcher's query.

If you want, you can block these bots from crawling to certain pages of your website or the whole website and indexing it so it’s not visible to other users. While you might have your reasons to do this, if you want your content to show up in search results or to be accessible by other users, you’ll have to get it crawled by the search engines first.

Conclusion

It looks easy to start a website and rank it on search engines, but once you’re in it, it might seem daunting. Understanding the Search engines isn’t a piece of cake. But to make it easy, you can start by learning the basics.

The basics such as we provided in this blog i.e., how search engines work, can help you understand the process and help you in deciding what to do next, or what to learn about next. So, even if you’ve never been here before, this blog can help you get to know a bit about search engines and how they work.