How do search engines work and should we really care?

 Are you aware of the fact that Google alone handles 2 trillion searches per year? Google searches are the part of our daily life that we use as a learning tool, fun, shopping etc. It won’t be wrong to say that we have reached a point where we are dependent on the search engines on almost anything we do. Have you ever wondered that why this is happening? The reason is we know that Google has the answers to all our questions and queries. So what actually happens when you type a question or query in the search box and enter? The search engine gives you more than one answer to your question. So how does it work?

If you are an entrepreneur or you want to develop a website with heavy traffic, the understanding of how search engines work will be definitely of much use to you.

So how does it actually work?

This is a very complicated system. It has to do a lot of work because it has to give you a precise and relevant answer to whatever you have written in the search box. The preparation work includes two main stages. In the first stage, the process of discovering the information is done and in the second stage, the organization of information is done so that it can be used in the later stage. These two stages are generally known as:

• Crawling

• Indexing

The process of crawling

Web crawlers are the number of computer programs that are used by the search engines for finding the information. These programs are publicly available on the internet. The job of these crawlers is to scan the internet and find the server hosting website. They use different techniques to crawl on each website and try to find out the relevant information, pictures or what so ever is related to the asked info. They are continuously doing this work. Moreover, they also keep the track of the changes that are made on the websites or pages to provide you with the upgraded information.

Also read: Best WordPress Alternatives for Blogging

The process of indexing

Crawling on the information is not the only thing that makes the search engine work. The information that crawlers identify needs to be organized. It also needs to be sorted and stored so that it can be processed by the search engines algorithms before it is presented to the user. This whole process of organizing, sorting and storing is known as web indexing.

All the information is not stored by the search engines but they keep the record of few things like when it was created or updated, type of the content, title and description, incoming and outgoing links and keywords are the parameters that are needed by the algorithms.

Also read: How High Google Ranking is Like Taking Candy From The Baby

One should really care about indexing because if your website is not in the index, there is no chance that your website will appear as a result on the search page. You need to optimize your website using search engine optimization (SEO) in order to keep it in the first five positions on the search page.

Also read: How Do You Look At The Leaves On The Tree? A Social Experiment