How Internet Search Engine Works

SEARCH ENGINE OPERATION

There are three major functions for which the search engines are known for: index building and crawling, relevance calculation to provide results and result serving.

Crawling and indexing

The World Wide Web can be determined as a big city subway system with numerous stops. And, these stops are the unique documents ranging from html pages to jpg files to pdf files to mp4 files and others. The search engine’s basic requirement is the availability of the paths through which they can make interconnection between the various documents and these paths are the links.

The automated robots of the search engines better known as the Crawlers or Spiders make an access to the millions of the documents. Once, the search pages are found, the code from these are deciphered by the crawlers following which these codes get stored in the hard drives to be recalled when a search term is entered. Constructed data centers of the search engines are present all over the world, which makes the task of storing billions of pages.

Search engines work hard to provide the search results which are provided in a span of 1-2 secs which is possible because of the thousands of machines which process the large quantities of information.

Providing the results

Search engines are rightly designated as the answer machines. When an online search is made, then two important tasks are performed by these search engines, narrow the search results to show only those pages which are relevant for the search and rank the search results based on their popularity and the traffic.

Here comes the SEO which make the pages both relevant and important. In the initial days search results were only based on the simple word matching which was not very relevant, but nowadays these search engines are much advanced and have hundreds of factors to narrow the searches which make the results very relevant.

Important determination by the search engines

Basically, the important determination nowadays is basically based on the popularity. The more valuable the information contained in a document, the more popular it is. The search engines use metrics to determine popularity which show more satisfying results.

The search engines make use of the carefully crafted mathematical equations, algorithms, and other methods to sort out relevant pages from the billions of pages and rank them accordingly.