How Do Search Engines Work & Why You Should Care The Story

Hey Folks! Today I am going to show you how Google Search Engine Works.
For many, Google is the internet. It’s the starting point for finding new sites, and is arguably the most important invention since the internet itself. Without search engines, new web content would be inaccessible to the masses.
But do you know how search engines work?
Every search engine has three main functions:
1.Crawling (to discover content)
2.Indexing (to track and store content)
3.retrieval (to fetch relevant content when users query the search engine).

Crawling.

Crawling is where it all begins: the acquisition of data about a website.

This involves scanning sites and collecting details about each page: titles, images, keywords, other linked pages, etc. Different crawlers may also look for different details, like page layouts, where advertisements are placed, whether links are crammed in, etc.

But how is a website crawled?

An automated bot (called a “spider”) visits page after page as quickly as possible, using page links to find where to go next. Even in the earliest days, Google’s spiders could read several hundred pages per second. Nowadays, it’s in the thousands.
What is indexing?
After a web page or document has been detected by crawlers, all its accessible data is stored (cached) on search engine servers so it can be retrieved when a user performs a search query. Indexing serves two purposes:

To return results related to a search engine user’s query
To rank those results in order of importance and relevancy
The order of ranking is dependent with each search engine’s ranking algorithm. These algorithms are highly complex formulas, made even more advanced by the relationship your website has with external sites and its on-page SEO factors.

To sum up, indexing exists to ensure that users questions are promptly answered as quickly as possible.

Why should I care about how a search engine works?

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When I first got into SEO, I was given this analogy to explain its importance. Imagine you built or moved to a house that was in the middle of nowhere. How would people that you want visiting you know that you were living there? You would need to give them your address and invite them over, have people who already know where you live tell others, as well as build access routes from other known routes so visitors have a way to get to you.

The very same could be said for search engines. They serve the purpose of telling others who may never have heard about your website that they should visit you if they want the answer to their search query.

If your business relies on online traffic, simply being crawled and indexed by the search engine is not enough to have your website found in search. With millions of pages being created, crawled and indexed daily – your website now has to employ Search Engine Optimisation strategies to ensure that it ranks highly enough above your competitors for it to be found.

Essentially this means your website must appear in the SERP for search queries that relate to your products or services. It must also answer the user questions inherent to these search queries, as this is key to converting after being found.