Search engines work by crawling thousands of billions of pages using their web crawlers. These web crawlers commonly referred to as search engines, spiders, or bots. A search engine navigates the web by downloading web pages and following links on these pages to discover new pages that have been made available.

All search engines work using a three-phase approach to ranking, managing, and returning search results; however, many people are clueless about what is happening behind that search box when they type in their search queries. The majority of the people tend to ask how do Google, Bing, and the rest of the search engines work? What is on the web? What is relevant to your general query? Which specific websites should be ranked highly? The following are the three functions:

Web Crawling

It is how search engines find out what is published out on the world wide web (www). Typically, crawling is copying what is on web pages and repeatedly checking the multitude of pages to see if they are changes and make a copy of any differences found. The program which has the job of doing this is known as spiders, crawlers, robots, or some variation using the web, such as a web crawler.

Indexing

Once a crawler has crawled a web page, a copy made is returned to the search engine and stored in a data center. Data centers are massive, purpose-built collections of servers that act as a repository of all the webpages’ copies made by the spider crawlers. Google owns numerous of them dotted around the world, which it guards very carefully and which are among the most hi-tech facilities in the world. The data store provides and organizes the search results you see on the search engine in a repository of web pages known as “index.”

Algorithm

Lastly, there is a vast collection of web page copies that are regularly updated and organized so you can quickly find what you are searching for on the internet. However, there is a need for ranking search results in order of relevance to your search term- this is where the algorithm comes into play. An algorithm is a very lengthy and complicated equation that calculates a value for any given site concerning a search term. Nobody knows what the algorithm is because search engines tend to keep this a closely guarded secret from competitors and from people looking to out-do the search engine to get to the top spot.