How does a search engine work?

[donamiller90]

How does a search engine work?

[Electrum]

Search engines work by crawling the web using bots called spiders. These web crawlers effectively follow links from page to page to find new content to add to the search index. When you use a search engine, relevant results are extracted from the index and ranked using an algorithm. If that sounds complicated, it's because it is.

[chris26]

Search engines spider the web with search bots. They find new sites and updated sites and index them in search results. They follow links on your site and links that have your site listed. They look at what sites list your site and if they are related to your website topic. They index your website by the keywords and description and rank it in search results by how good it is.

[Cyril30]

“search engine” is several interlinked mechanisms that work together to identify pieces of web content — images, videos, website pages, etc.

[brandonwood]

Search engines are complex computer programs. To fully understand every aspect of a search engine, you’d have to do a lot of studying and gain a deep understanding of computer algorithms. To save you trouble and confusion, we’ll go over the basics of how search engines work.

Basically, search engines work by sending bots called “spiders” or “crawlers” to every website on the internet. These spiders crawl through your website and pick up certain pieces of information, like URLs, headers, navigation, website structure, and more. These pieces of information are indexed and stored, so when someone performs a search, search engines provide results based on that information.

These spiders also follow the links on your page, leading them to crawl further and further into the internet, picking up information and storing it in the search engine’s index. This is why internal linking on your page is helpful for keeping your content indexed and updated by search engines.

[laragiles]

A search engine is an online tool that is designed to search for websites on the internet based on the user's search query. It looks for the results in its own database, sorts them and makes an ordered list of these results using unique search algorithms.

[jessepeterson]

A search engine is an online tool that is designed to search for websites on the internet based on the user's search query. Most search engines build an index based on crawling, which is the process through which engines like Google, Yahoo and others find new pages to index.