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.

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.

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.

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.

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.