Search Engines Work Using a 3 Step Process/stages
What are Search Engines?
Search Engines are systems with sophisticated algorithems to Crawl, Index, and Rank web content displayed Search Engine Results Pages SERP in an ordered manner.
Google is the clear category leader capturing 92% of the search market share.
When we talk about Search Engines, Its not only Google, Baidu, Bing but YouTube, Quora and Pinterest are also called Search Engines.
The end goal for all search engines is to provide fast and relevant results the users looking for.
The 3 - Google Search Stages
Google Search works in three stages.
- Crawling: Google crawls text, images, and videos from pages it found on the internet with automated programs called crawlers.
- Indexing: Google analyzes the text, images, and video files on the page, and stores the information in the Google index, which is a large database.
- Rankings: When a user searches on Google, Google returns information that’s relevant to the user’s query.
Search is a powerful tool. It allows users to find, share, and access an almost infinite amount of content. Regardless of how or where they connect, understanding how Google Search works is essential if you have an online business and you want your customers to find you. Whether you have a website, blog, social media profile, or Google My Business listing, Google goes through a whole journey to find your business, categorize it, and show it to your potential customers.
Crawling
First, Google needs to realize your business has a presence on the web. For this, Google constantly searches for new content to add to its huge catalog. This discovery process is called crawling.
Indexing
Google generally discovers web pages by following links from page to page, finding new content never seen before. Once the Google crawler, which we call Google Bot, has found your website, it now need to understand what the content is all about. This process is called indexing.
Google generally discovers web pages by following links from page to page, finding new content never seen before. Once the Google crawler, which we call Google Bot, has found your website, it now need to understand what the content is all about. This process is called indexing.
Just as you would organize the inventory of your store, whether it’s shoes, sweaters, or dresses, Google analyzes the content on your page and saves this information to its index, a database considered to be the biggest library in the world.
All right, now Google has found your website and Google Bot knows you have an online store that sells toys. What happens next?
Ranking
When a user types a search query, Google’s system sort through hundreds of billions of web pages in the search index, looking for the most useful and relevant results in a fraction of a second. This step is called ranking.
For a typical query, there are thousands, even millions, of web pages with potentially relevant information. Google has to determine the highest quality and most relevant answers, returning the content that provides the best user experience and most appropriate results. Some of these factors may include the user’s location, language, and device type.
For example, searching for buy a nice shirt might show different answers to a user’s searching from New York than it would to a user searching from Miami.
Remember Google search results are organic and generated through sophisticated algorithms that make thousands of calculations for each search in a fraction of a second based only on the relevance of a page to a user searched.
Google never accepts payment from anyone to be included in organic search results or to alter a page ranking in any way. When you use Google search, ads may appear with your search
Results, but they are clearly labeled so they are easy to distinguish from the rest of the page. So now you know that.
Google crawls the web to discover new content, Google indexes the content, categorizing it like a catalog, and Google’s ranking system scan the index to serve the most relevant results to users.
