Dear friends, for those of you who want to learn SEO, the very first thing you need to understand is what a search engine is. So let’s dive into what a search engine is and how it works.
What is a Search Engine?
A Search Engine is a software program that collects, stores, and retrieves information as needed. It works like a spider’s web, constantly spreading across the internet to gather data.
Whenever we search for something using a search engine, it instantly provides us with all the related information. This task is completed in less than a second!
Before the invention of search engines, people had to manually browse web directories to find information. This was time-consuming, and finding accurate data was difficult. But after the invention of search engines, people can now find thousands of results instantly and accurately.
Currently, the most popular search engine in the world is Google.com, with nearly 3.5 billion searches happening on Google every day.
The main reason behind Google’s popularity is its ability to provide accurate results in a very short time.
Besides Google, there are many other search engines. Here is a list:
- Bing
- Yahoo
- Baidu
- Yandex.ru
- DuckDuckGo
- Ask.com
- AOL.com
- WolframAlpha
- Internet Archive
- Dogpile
- AltaVista
If you want to learn SEO, it’s important to not only understand what a search engine is but also how it works. So let’s look at how search engines operate.
How Does a Search Engine Work?
When we type something into a search engine, it returns all relevant information in less than a second. But how does it manage to do this so quickly and accurately?
Search engines perform this task through a series of steps. These steps are outlined below:
Step 1 – Crawling
Search engines use special software programs called web crawlers. These crawlers visit and scan websites across the internet.
The first step is crawling, where the crawler visits all web pages it can find.
Step 2 – Indexing
These crawlers behave like tiny librarians. As they find new or updated content on the web, they store that information in the search engine’s database or library, called the index.
Just like a real library organizes books into categories, web crawlers store website content under specific categories based on keywords. This makes it easier to retrieve the right information later.
Step 3 – Retrieval and Ranking
When a user enters a search query, the search engine checks its index for all web pages that match the query and displays them in order of relevance.
Search engines follow different algorithms to rank web pages. For example, Google displays results in a ranked order. The first result has the highest rank, and the tenth result has a lower rank.
Google uses over 200 ranking factors to determine which pages appear first. If your website follows all of these ranking factors correctly, it will rank higher in search results.
This entire process of improving and optimizing your website to rank better in search results is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Types of Search Engines
Based on their operation and algorithms, search engines can be divided into three types:
- Primary Search Engines
(e.g., Google, Bing, Yahoo) - Secondary Search Engines
(e.g., MSN, Snap, HotBot) - Targeted Search Engines
(e.g., AOL Search, Lycos, AltaVista)
Additionally, search engines are generally categorized into four functional types:
- Crawler-Based Search Engines – Use web crawlers to find and index pages.
- Web Directories – Human-curated directories where sites are listed under categories.
- Hybrid Search Engines – Combine crawler-based and human-powered results.
- Meta Search Engines – Collect results from multiple search engines and display them together.
Conclusion
That’s it for today! Hopefully, this post has helped you understand what a search engine is and how it works.
In our next post, we will discuss “What is SEO? Why is SEO important?” in detail.
If you found this article helpful, don’t forget to share it and leave a comment!
Thank you!
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