What Is a Search Engine and How Does It

What is in this article?

What Is a Search Engine?

What is a search engine? It is the database system that answers the search queries made to reach content on the internet.

Search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex, Yahoo and the like record almost all the information on the web into their databases and work to serve the most relevant results to the searches made, in line with their own algorithms.

The basic logic of search engines is the same. But in this article we will mostly talk about Google, the most advanced search engine service.

How Do Search Engines Work?

A search engine carries out the process in 3 stages.

Crawling
Indexing
Serving results

Search engines reach the information published publicly on the web and record it into their own libraries (databases). Processing that information according to their own algorithms, they serve the most relevant answers, web pages and links to the search queries made as information to the user.

Websites, videos, images, music — in short, every kind of content on the web you can think of — are a pile of information with no central system. Search engines gather that information together by recording it as an index, that is, like the contents page of a book. When we make a search they try to serve us the most accurate information within fractions of a second.

1. How Do Search Engines Crawl Content?

Google, for example, has enormous data processing centres in many parts of the world. Google's software — "this software is also called a 'spider', 'Googlebot' or 'robot'" — gathers information about content and links from the publicly available data on the web, just as we browse web pages ourselves, and sends it to the data centre where it is processed. This discovery process is called "crawling".

As part of SEO — search engine optimisation — work, website owners report the sitemap containing all the links on the website to Google through Google Search Console. Content not reported by this method is generally crawled and indexed either through the links given to the page or by Google discovering those pages.

2. How Do Search Engines Index Content?

In order to build the index, Google's bots record and index each page they crawl together with all the words they see at the crawl step, their positions on the page and their attributes (such as bold, italic, h1, title).

While indexing, it runs the page through a set of criteria it pays attention to. For example: it checks whether the page to be indexed is a copy of another page. If that page is copied content it understands this and visits the page less often in subsequent crawls. That page will therefore never rank at the top in Google.

3. How Do Search Engines Serve Results?

When you make a search in Google it examines more than 200 criteria to find and serve you the most suitable content. It returns the results it thinks are most relevant. So what is this relevance algorithm made up of 200 factors, and how does it work?

Google Relevance

This is the stage where, when you make a search query in Google with a keyword phrase, it decides which of the pieces of content offering similar material is the more suitable one.

As we mentioned above, it examines more than 200 criteria in order to serve the most relevant content. It keeps developing those 200 criteria in order to produce better results. These criteria are Google's own algorithm and it never publishes them as a list anywhere. But the basic criteria that will increase relevance are known. SEO — search engine — specialists design the structure and content of the web page to fit those criteria and thereby try to gain more visibility, and traffic, in search queries.

What Should We Do (SEO) to Rank Higher in Search Results?

Your web page should run very fast; you can visit this page to check speed.
The website should be mobile-friendly, and AMP should be used for faster-loading pages,
Content should be prepared for users, not for search engines,
Headlines and content intended to deceive users should not be produced.
Verify your site in Google Analytics and Google Search Console and make sure it is indexable. Try to clear the warnings and errors.
Try to understand how search engines work better.
Page titles and URL extensions should be written simply so they describe the content. For example: instead of an unexplanatory headline such as Love your heart!, a headline such as What should we pay attention to for your heart health! would be more meaningful.
A meta description explaining what the page is about should be written,
Links (backlinks) should be given to relevant sites, provided this is not overdone,
Social media should be encouraged so content spreads further,
Images should be optimised and uploaded in suitable formats. The image name and descriptions should also be entered to fit the image content,
Just as writing an essay has particular rules, writing content for a website has particular rules too. Your posts on the website — the headline, subheadings, paragraphs, lists (bullets), emphasis words and links — should be written to the rules,

When you apply these points to your content you will have carried out SEO optimisation and gained better visibility in search results.

What Is a Search Engine and How Does It Work? A Basic Guide