Search Engine: The Book Containing Answers To Your All Questions
How Search Engines Work: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking
Whenever people are learning, shopping, surfing news or stuck at something they go to search engines first. They have answers to all of the questions whether it’s a silly one or a super-intelligent one. These search engines pull perfect, if not perfect then at least relatable answers from the vast ocean of the internet to all of your queries. Here in this article, we are about to get acquainted with the basic working structure of search engines. Let’s talk about How Search Engines Work: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking.
How do search engines work?
The process is divided into three parts:
Crawling
Search engines use complex programs called web crawlers. They are also known as “spiders” as they crawl the vast “world wide web”. They are developed to gather information from different sources. They begin their journey of crawling from some well-known web hosting servers. Whilst crawling the web pages, they come across many attached hyperlinks. They go through those hyperlinks as well to gather related information.
In today’s world, thousands of new web pages are being developed every day. It would be next to impossible to go through all of them. Hence, there are some defined protocols for these spiders which they are bound to follow. These protocols would save time and efforts of spiders by keeping them away from crawling unnecessary and unrelated information. Since spiders are programmed to crawl all webpages, the website owners might be concerned regarding privacy. One solution is to make a “robots.txt” file. This file should include rules for the crawlers, for instance, what web pages and links to be crawled and followed. The crawlers will search for this “robots.txt” file before beginning the crawling process. Having a “robots.txt” file would be beneficial for crawlers too as they don’t have to go through all the content resulting in saving time.
The content of webpages is updated regularly. Hence the spiders need to go through them periodically to keep the updated information to provide the latest information to the end-users.
Indexing
After crawling has been done, the information gathered by the spiders needs to be parsed well in order to get the best out of them. The process of sorting and organizing useful crawled information is called indexing.
This indexing is very similar to the indexing of a book, keeping the important data to get the query related information easily. If the webpages are not indexed in search engines’ warehouses, they will not show up on the resulting web pages when searched. Hence, the more web pages get indexed, the more chances of showing up the website on the search result page.
Ranking
Indexing the web pages simply means that they would be shown to the end-users on the search result page. However, that does not mean it would show up on the first page or within the top five search results. They can appear on any page. Here’s when the ranking process comes into the picture.
One may think that this ranking is done by matching the titles or the description of the content to users’ queries. However, it’s not simple like that. Maybe at the beginning of the search engine era, they might have used this to rank those sites. However, nowadays ranking is done by the ranking algorithm of different search engines. They have a certain set of rules by which they scrutinize the crawled and indexed content warehouse. Numerous factors are responsible for the results to be ranked such as the speed, links, traffic, etc. The main goal behind this ranking mechanism is to provide the latest and most relevant results of users’ queries.
What happens when the user enters a query in the search bar?
Firstly, the search engine analyses the user-entered query. It breaks down the query into comprehensible keywords. After that, the engine searches keyword related information in their index. Once the search engine gets query related information, of course, ranked by the algorithm, results are displayed on the result page.
Conclusion
Day by day these search engines are getting smarter thanks to the new technologies. One of them is Machine learning. It has opened the gates for search engines to elevate their intelligence to the next level. It assists them to understand similar words and provide the information as accurately as possible. Although search engines are constantly improving their technologies and processes, they have the same basic working structure and now you know it.
