Search Engine Operations Explained

A web search engine or Internet search engine is a software system that is designed to carry out web search (Internet search),  which means to search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a web search query. The search results are generally presented in a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information may be a mix of web pages, images, videos, infographics, articles, research papers and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories, which are maintained only by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a web crawler (an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web, typically for the purpose of Web indexing). Internet content that is not capable of being searched by a web search engine is generally described as the deep web.
HOW DO SEARCH ENGINES OPERATE?
Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN perform four basic tasks. These are as follows: 

1. Search engines use programs called bots or spiders to “crawl” the World Wide Web, looking for pages. 2. When a bot or spider finds and crawls a page, it can then store it in the search engine’s database. This is called indexing. The search engine’s index contains all of the pages and documents the spiders or bots have crawled. 

3. Search engines process queries. For instance, when you go to Google and type “affordable camping gear” into the search box, Google processes your query and returns you results based on what you are looking for. Hundreds of millions of these queries take place every day. 

4. The final function of a search engine is to rank results. When you type in a query like the above, the search engine quickly runs a sorting equation to see which results it feels are most relevant to your query. This sorting equation is called an algorithm, and each search engine has a different algorithm. In other words, they have different priorities regarding what web pages they think are the best match for what the query is. They perform this huge task of picking the best results in seconds. Stay tuned for more updates. Subscribe here and Have a nice day.