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Want To Know How A Search Engine Functions?

What is a Search Engine?

• Search Engine is basically software that helps in searching through the web using various algorithms.
• Whatever is typed and searched is called a search query.
• The whole WWW(World Wide Web) is searched for a query.
• Almost all the search engines work in a similar way, with a slight difference in their algorithms for fetching the results.
• These algorithms are private to the organisations.
• The Result of a search engine is a fixture of web pages, images, articles, gifs, graphics, and all the different types of files available.
• One of the first search engines was Archie, developed in 1990 by Alan Emtage.
• Archie use to search on the file system based on the file’s name.
• There was no indexing and no search optimisation algorithm used in Archie.

How results are shown and pages are found?

• Every Search Engines have their own software and algorithm to perform the searches, most of them work on the same path.
• The only difference between the different search engines is their algorithm.
• Three steps are performed for executing a single search query, these steps are common to every search engine.
• In the first step, search engines examine the content of the files that they know and have permission to see.
• This step is called Crawling.
• In the second step, every page is categorised or divided into different categories.
• This step is known as Indexing.
• In the third step, the usability of the content is found, and the content is ranked according to that.
• This step is known as Ranking.

How search engine is working?

• Search Engine crawls the internet or we can say WWW(World wide web).
• Crawling is done to discover content like web pages, images, graphics, videos, gifs, and different types of files.
• There is a program or an algorithm that is used by the search engines to go through the content.
• This program or algorithm is known as spiders or robots(also known as bots).
• These programs or bots search every page and move from one page to another, continuously through the links.
• Content is revisited very frequently so as to update the indexing and the ranking according to the changes made in the content.
• The index is the list of the content that is visited by the bots.
• When we try to search for something, the search engine searches its indexes looking for a match.
• There is a great possibility that the search term is present in millions of different content present in the indexing.
• Now the Ranking comes into play.
• The ranking is done using different algorithms that are secret to the search engine organisations only.

How content is ranked by the Search Engine?

• Although ranking algorithms are top-secret, there are a few things that are helpful to improve the ranking of content.
• Length of a page, that is content length.
• External links to the other contents.
• Internal links to other content of your website.
• There are the key factors that are generally used in a ranking algorithm.

How does the Search Engine Algorithm work?

• The Search Engine Algorithm scans the whole page.
• In the first step, the title of the page is scanned and indexed.
• The title should be accurate to the searches.
• In the second step, the content of the page is scanned.
• Images present in the pages are scanned as the image name and the description not by how the image looks.
• Image name should describe what the images show, so as to improve the indexing and ranking of the page.
• An alternative text can be added to the images to give a proper description.
• In this way, the search engine algorithm works.

Conclusion

In this blog, we have covered what a search engine is, how it works and how we can have our content at the top of the search result.

References

• https://learndigital.withgoogle.com/digitalgarage/course/digital-marketing/

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