Understanding the Search Engine: The basics

Search engines can very well be termed as the wonder genie of our times; just imagine, whatever may be your query, all it takes for the search engine to come with answers is a couple of seconds! Now that’s what we call speed.

Search engines have over time evolved as the primary tool used by people for searching information on the World Wide Web. So, if you want to market or sell through internet, you need to master the search engines, because if they don’t show your website in their listings you would be nowhere as a marketer.

So how exactly do the search engines work? Let’s try and understand their methodology of searching for relevant information from the billions of pages that are online on the World Wide Web.

The search engines basically operate through four practices that they employ on a regular basis. Understanding them would definitely help you in making your website search engine friendly and thereby increasing the chances of your website getting high rankings on the search engines.

The four tasks performed by all search engines are:

Web Crawling:

Search engines have specialized software called ‘crawlers’ or ‘bots’. They send them out into the World Wide Web, these crawlers reads through the hyper link structure of the Web pages to try and understand the type of content that is in there.

Indexing:

After they have crawled through a particular webpage, they would add its content to their giant database-the search engine ‘index’. These indexes are a store house containing billions of pages; it actually acts as the quick reference guide for the search engine.

Processing a Query:

When you search for a particular term, the search engine looks into its index and lists out all pages with matching data. Higher relevancy is awarded for pages having the exact term as in the query. The important point worth mentioning here is that the search engine doesn’t look in the open World Wide Web while processing a query, it only looks through the pages it has indexed. So, the sooner your pages get indexed by the search engines, faster will their appearance on them.

Search Engine Ranking:

For a particular search term, there might be thousands, if not millions of relevant pages indexed by the search engines. So, how does it rank them? The search engines have their own particular algorithm and they run it through all the relevant pages and rank them as per the relevancy with respect to a particular search query.

Understanding the working of search engines can definitely help you to fine tune your website in accordance to the way they work. That’s very important if you actually intend to derive results from the search engines.

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