Alnisa Designs & Co
Web Design & SEO Agency

How Do Search Engines Work?

What Are Search Engines?

What is a search engine? A search engine is a program that searches all the indexed sites on the internet for keywords and displays them on a search results page. The results that are returned match the user’s search phrase or keywords.

How Do Search Engines Work?

When Google receives a search query from a site visitor, it crawls through more than 130 trillion individual pages across the Internet and then selects the best results to display in less than one second. Pretty impressive, huh?

A search engine is a interlinked network system that works to identify pieces of web content that includes images, videos, and web pages all based on the words you type on the search bar.

Once you understand how search engines work to find, organize and display results, you can better optimize your web pages so that they rank. Site owners use search engine optimization techniques to improve the chances that their site will display in search results.

Search engines use three basic processes:

> Web Crawlers
> Search Index
> Search Algorithms

How Search Engines Crawl, Index and Rank Content

The search engine process might seem deceptively simple yet there is plenty of very complex computations occurring in the background in order to access and display all that targeted information in such an orderly fashion. Google’s search engine, along with other engines as well, work hard even before a visitor types a keyword in the search bar to locate a website. Plenty of information gathering is performed on the millions of newly added websites as well as updates that are made to existing websites. This all occurs in a 3-step process which includes crawling webpages, indexing them or including them into the database, and then ranking them using search algorithms.

Website Crawling

Search engines use robots called crawlers that search the Internet for information. They use algorithms and rules to decide on which sites to crawl and how frequently. The website crawlers visit each site and follow all links whether they are external or internal to the site’s pages. Overtime, the crawlers will build a list of pages they have accessed and create a map of linked pages which were easy to crawl. If your website can not be crawled by the web bots then your website cannot be indexed or show in search results. Use this Site Audit Tool to make sure your site is accessible to web crawlers.

Website Indexing

After the bot locates the page, it displays it the way your browser would and shows images, videos along with other dynamic page content. The bot then organizes the site’s content into images, code, text and of course, keywords. This process allows the bot to interpret what is on each page, which is necessary when deciding which keyword searches the page’s content is relevant for.

If you want to find out what a web bot sees when they land on your site’s pages then use this URL Inspection Tool. You can also use this tool to determine why web crawlers wont index your page or just simply ask Google to crawl it. You can also use a file called robots.txt to tell bots which pages you dont want crawled so they wont show up in Google search.

Website Ranking

So how does Google rank your website and provide the appropriate pages for the searched keywords provided? Search engines sort through all the indexed websites in their database and then return the correct results based on what the user searched for. This is able to be done through a set of rules, called an Algorithm, which uses ranking factors to make sure the returned results are relevant.

Did you know that Google utilizes human Search Quality Raters to test and refine the algorithm to make sure it’s working properly so each user has an adequate search experience?

How Search Engines Personalize Search Results

Search engines understand and customize search results depending on the user, the browser as well as their device. Personalization also depends on many varying factors. Some of those ranking factors include:

Language
Your location
As well as your search history

Understanding how search engines work is just the beginning of learning how to rank your site higher in Google and organically get more traffic.

Getting your site found is the deciding factor of whether your site will rank or not. If Google’s bots cannot locate, crawl or index your site pages then you will be up the creek without a paddle before you even learned how to swim.

Contact us if you want us to check on your site’s health and its indexability so you can organically rank well in Google Search.

Until next time…