How do search engines work?

Search Engine:

Search engines are those web pages that enable us to search information from all across the Internet. Search engines take a couple of words or phrases (often termed as keywords) and using its intense crawling algorithms search all the relevant content on the Internet. The results are often a list of many (often hundreds) Website Links, every link leading to a website that might contain the relevant information.

Bing, Google, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo are the most popular search engines

How do they work?

Search Engines work based on the keywords or phrases typed into the search bar. All those websites that have the related content are filtered and a database is created thereof. The search results that we get very often on GOOGLE are nothing but the entries of this database.

Consider the diagram.

• Story starts with the user typing the words or phrases to search in the searchbar.

• Search engines, after getting those words and phrases, initiate their crawlers.

• Crawlers are intelligent computer programs that can infiltrate websites based on their content and keywords fed in the <meta> tags.

• While crawling through as many websites as they can, crawlers collect all those websites that either have the content or keywords similar to the words and phrases that are searched.

• All the URLs, Website names, major keywords that led those websites to be searched alongwith a little description about the website, are stored in a temporary database that is created right there at the moment of search.

• Once data of all the filtered websites is stored in the database, it is now opened up and indexing starts.

• Indexing is the process of making a list of all the website informations that are gathered. Once it is done, the results are finally shown to the user.