How do search engines work? (a beginner's guide)

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If you are a developer, designer, small business owner, or professional marketer, you should learn how search engines (SEs) work.

Having a clear understanding of how search engines work will help you create a website that will be accessible to search engines and will rank, which can bring its own benefits. This is the first step to take before you start doing search engine optimization (SEO) or other types of SEM (search engine marketing).

In this guide, you'll learn step-by-step how search engines work to find, organize, and display information to users.

What is a search engine?
A search engine is a software package that searches the Internet for web pages that contain the wordpress web design agency information the user is looking for. The search results (SERPs) are presented in order of importance and relevance to what the user is looking for.

Modern search engines include various types of content in their search results, including articles, videos, photos, forum posts, and social media posts.

The most popular search engine is Google. It covers 90% of the market. It is followed by Bing, DuckDuckGo and others.



How Search Engines Work
Search engines scan publicly available pages using special spider bots (crawlers). Crawlers (aka spiders or bots) are special programs that scan the Internet to find pages or updates to existing pages and add information from these pages to the search index.

This process is divided into three stages:
The first stage is the process of information discovery.
The second stage is information organization.
The third stage is deciding which pages to show in search results for queries and in what order.
These stages are also known as Crawling , Indexing and Ranking.

how do search engines work
1. Scanning
During the crawling process, the goal of a search engine is to find publicly available information on the internet. This includes new content and updates to content already in the index. Search engines do this using a large number of software programs called crawlers.

To simplify a complex process, all you need to know is that the job of search bots is to scan the internet and find servers (also known as web servers) where websites are hosted.

They create a list of all web servers and the number of sites that are hosted on each server.

Bots visit each site and use various methods to figure out how many pages those sites have and the types of content on each page (text, images, videos, etc.).

When visiting a web page, crawlers also follow any links (both those that lead to other pages on the site and those that lead to other sites) to discover more and more pages.

They do this constantly and track changes made to sites, which gives them knowledge of new pages added or removed, which links have been updated, etc.

Considering that there are over 130 trillion pages on the internet these days, you can imagine how much work that would be for bots.

What do you need to know about the scanning process?
The first thing you need to take care of when optimizing a website is its full accessibility, otherwise if search bots cannot “read” it, then you should not expect high positions or search traffic.

As mentioned above, crawlers have a lot of work to do, and you need to try to make their job easier.

Below are a few things to consider to ensure spiders can find and access your site as quickly and without any problems.

Use robots.txt to specify which pages should not be indexed. For example, admin pages, backend pages, and other pages that should not be accessible to the entire Internet.
Major search engines like Google and Bing have tools (called Webmaster Panels) that can be used to provide search engines with more information about your site (number of pages, structure, etc.) so that they don't have to figure it out themselves.