I’m sure you’ve used a search engine before, but have you ever wondered how it works? Let’s take a walkthrough of the steps and processes involved in powering a search engine.
First off, when you type your query into the search bar, that information is sent to the search engine’s indexing server which breaks it down into meaningful chunks. The indexing server then looks through its database, which contains billions of web pages, to find the ones that are most relevant to your query.
Once it has gathered a list of all potential matches, it sorts them according to a variety of factors like relevancy, popularity and authority. At this point, the search engine has a ranked list of web pages that it can display in response to your query.
But before doing so, the search engine runs another step – called ‘ranking’. This is where it analyses each page to determine its relevance and usefulness for users. It does this by looking at factors like keyword density, title tags, meta tags, and backlinks.
Once the search engine has ranked the web pages, it can display them for users in a list format. This is also known as a ‘search result page’. These pages contain snippets of information about each potential result such as title, description and URL to make it easier for you to find what you’re looking for.
That’s how a search engine works! It’s a complex process, but it doesn’t take too long from your query to the results page you see. The next time you use a search engine, be sure to think about all of the steps involved behind the scenes – it really is quite amazing!