SEARCH ENGINE AND HOW IT WORKS

Google is the internet. It’s the starting point for finding new sites and is arguably the most important invention since the internet itself. Without search engines, new web content would be inaccessible to the masses.

When a person uses a search engine to resolve a concern, either on Google, Yahoo! or Bing – to name the most popular – hundreds of millions of virtual interactions occur internally to find a response in seconds.

These are the four basic functions that define the operation:

1. Crawling

The crawlers or web spiders are software robots that handle trace files and browse hundreds of billions of pages found on the Web. Usually, this is determined by tracking the keywords that make the searches of search engine users, a factor that varies second by second: according to Moz, only  30% of searches performed on search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo! corresponds generic words and phrases. The remaining 70% are usually random.

2. Indexing

After the screening process, search engines decoded, sorted and stored each of the files found in different ‘virtual warehouse’, which are sorted according to keywords and phrases that define them, so that when a person performs a search engine can instantly find the information corresponding to it.

3.Retrieving

This step involves activities related to retrieving the best-matched results for a user query.

It can be further divided into 2 sub-functions: Processing & Calculating relevancy

• Processing: When a search request comes, the search engine processes it. i.e. it

compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the

database.

Calculating Relevancy: Since it is likely that more than one pages contain the

search string, so the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the

pages in its index to the search string.

4. Ranking

Once the information indexed, the search is responsible for evaluating the content, structure and other factors – publication date, number and duration of visits, number of backlinks (links to an external reference), the origin of those backlinks, among others – each of the stored files to determine its relevance. According to this assessment, the search engine gives it an order of importance to each of the files found, so that when a user performs a search to find the best results ever.