How Search Engines work?

How Search Engines work?

The foremost thing you need to know about SEO ( search engine optimization ) is that Engines are not like human beings; by the way how websites are viewed by search engines and visitors shows the difference that search engines are different from human beings. Search engines are geared towards text. In this present technological era search engines cannot fell the website designs, cannot watch movies and cannot grab the sounds. Search engines spiders ( Crawler or Robots ) crawl the websites and search for mainly content to understand the nature of the site. This explains us that search engines are intelligent creatures but different from humans.

What does the search do?...

 Generally search engines participate in several functional activities like it's crawls, indexes, retrieves, process, calculate relevancy to deliver accurate search result.

• Crawling
• Indexing
• Retrieving

The step wise process of the search engines are, at first the search engine spiders or crawlers or robots
(Google spiders is called as googlebot) crawls the all web pages of the website. These robots or spiders follow all inbound (internal) and outbound (external) links to index every page they crawl. As there are millions of websites crawlers doesn't visit site daily. so if new pages are added to your website it takes time to index the pages. sometimes it can take one month to visit your site. so during this time the SEO done for the site will not show the desired results. But your site will be rewarded later by the search engines, so you need to be quite to get natural permanent seo results.

Crawler

What you need to do is to see how the spiders crawl you website. As we know the spiders are not human so they cannot recognize JavaScript, images, flash animation, password protect pages, frames and also directories, so if your site contains more number of these contents you need to know how the spider crawls your site by using spider simulator ( spider view tool). if your content is not visible in this then it means that search engines cannot index ( detect) that types of content.


The second step of this process is, the search engines after crawling all pages are it indexes the pages according to its content. These indexed pages are stored in search engines huge database from where the data is retrieved later when needed. The process of indexing is based or detecting the words and content of the page, particularly assigning the page to keywords. As there is huge database sometimes it is difficult to retrieve the accurate content needed by the visitor. so by optimizing the site will help the search engines to easily identify the particular content needed by the visitor and also helps to increases the site to get high rankings.

The third step of this process is, the search engines process when the search request is done, it compares the keyword typed in the search bar with the indexed pages from all the servers (database). As search engines find millions of pages with same keyword, it uses its own algorithms to calculate the best site taking many factors into consideration and display the relevant pages (SERPs) for the visitor.

Different search engines have algorithms which are used by different search engines to find the relevancy, by taking many different factors into consideration such as density of keywords, Meta tags or back links. So different search result are generated by various search engines like Google, Yahoo,and Bing. And also the big challenging point to optimizers is that search engine algorithms are frequently changed, so to maintain your site ranking constantly ( permanently) you need to adapt to the latest changes done by the search engines and optimize your site accordingly.

The last process of the search engines is retrieving the desired pages to the visitors. it is nothing but just displaying the pages in the browser to the visitors. The pages are arranged in order according to site relevancy.

Next Chapter : Classification of Search Engines.