How Search Engine Works

Understanding how search engines works, how they see a website is very important for anyone who want to learn and do SEO. Search Engines, marvelous human creations, mainly does four things...

1. Crawling
2. Building an Index
3. Calculation relevancy and rankings
4. Serving Results

Crawling

Imagine the World Wide Web as a network of stops in a big city subway system.Each stop is its own unique document (usually a web page, but sometimes a PDF, JPG or other document types). Search engines need a way to "crawl" the entire path to a stop, they user best paths for their route to the stop i.e. links

Through link search engine's automated robots also know as "crwalers" or "spiders", they reach to billions of interconnected pages or documents.

Indexing

Once the engines find these pages, their next job is to parse the code from them and store selected pieces of the pages in massive hard drives, to be recalled when needed in a query. To accomplish the monumental task of holding billions of pages that can be accessed in a fraction of a second, the search engines have constructed massive data-centers in cities all over the world.

These monstrous storage facilities hold thousands of machines processing unimaginably large quantities of information. After all, when a person performs a search at any of the major engines, they demand results immediately even a couple of seconds delay can cause dissatisfaction so the search engines work hard to provide answers as fat as possible.

Calculation relevancy & rankings

Currently, the major engines typically interpret importance as popularity – the more popular a site, page or document, the more valuable the information contained therein must be. This assumption has proven fairly successful in practice, as the engines have continued to increase users’ satisfaction by using metrics that interpret popularity.

Popularity and relevance aren’t determined manually (and thank goodness, because those trillions of man-hours would require earth’s entire population as a workforce). Instead, the engines craft careful, mathematical equations – algorithms – to sort the wheat from the chaff and to then rank the wheat in order of tastiness (or however it is that farmers determine wheat’s value). These algorithms are often comprised of hundreds of components. In the search marketing field, we often refer to them as "ranking factors".

Serving Results

When a person searches for something online, it requires the search engines to scour their corpus of billions of documents and do two things – first, return only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher’s query, and second, rank those results in order of perceived value (or importance). It is both “relevance” and “importance” that the process of search engine optimization is meant to influence.

To the search engines, relevance means more than simply having a page with the words you searched for prominently displayed. In the early days of the web, search engines didn’t go much further than this simplistic step, and found that their results suffered as a consequence. Thus, through iterative evolution, smart engineers at the various engines devised better ways to find valuable results that searchers would appreciate and enjoy. Today, hundreds of factors influence relevance.