How Search Engines Work?

Ever wonder how a search engines displays a set of results for a particular keyword search made on them? To understand SEO, you must know how search engines work. Fourth blog on SEO tutorials is on how search engines work.

A few days back I met one of the students of the first semester of BCA course, he did asked one question to me how come these websites are featuring for the keyword which I am searching for in Google? How come Google decides that these are the sites or best possible results for the particular keyword?

And at the end his last question was how search engines work?

So to continue the SEO Tutorials series which we started a few weeks back, I am going to explain the responses to all these questions.

It is also true that a few years (around 10 years) back I was also the one who was thinking the same. Though there was no one who explained this to me, but I thought whatever I know I should share with the readers of my blog and hence came up with this SEO tutorials series.

How Search Engines Work?

We do wonder how search engines like Google provide responses to our queries so brilliantly. It happens because search engines work on following things:

Indexing Sites

Normally every search engines do have one crawler, whose function is to crawl the websites and index them into the database of the search engines based on the keywords found on them.

I guess I said too many things in one line, let me explain.

Crawler is a set of program which browses all the websites through which it came through. It has a special duty. It browses the website like a normal user and tries to store the data in the database of the search engines. This process is known as indexing the websites.

This way all the search engines create a database of different websites. Now you might ask me, how a crawler reaches to or finds your website?

How Crawler Reaches to Your Website?

This is not a very complex question, it actually goes by links. When crawler reaches to a page it navigates from that page after indexing, to a new page through the links present on that page. This way it lands to a new page to index it.

It is also true that if it has indexed a website, it will revisit the site on a regular basis to crawl it further and index it again and again. This is the reason why I said that search engines love fresh and updated sites in my latest blog on why blogging is required for your business.

Sometimes crawlers are also called as bots or spiders as well.

Providing Responses

So the process of crawling or indexing of websites is clear now, this way search engines maintain a huge database. Once a visitor searches for some keywords or key phrases on them, it has the duty to provide responses to them.

It usually picks results from its database and serves the same to the users. You might ask me this question, there should be thousands or even millions of website stored in the database of the search engines for a particular set of keywords, how do they determine the importance or precedence of the results?

How Do Search Engines Decide the Precedence?

Well, for doing this every search engines do have their own set of criteria’s. These set of criteria’s are also sometimes known as Algorithm, based on which a search engine decides the set of results for a particular keywords search.

There was a time when it was decided based on the number of back links a web page has. Clearly there was the time when search engines were considering each back links as a vote to a page and thus it was ranking the sites based on the popularity judged by links.

But now as far as the algorithm of Google is concerned, it has changed drastically. It decides the popularity of a page through the likes and dislikes of the page on social media websites like Google+, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and it also combines the points based on different ranking factors.

Now these ranking factors which certainly has more than hundreds of signals, decides the fate of a website in search results on Google.

To be very frank, now the popularity based on different ranking factors along with the relevance of the websites is considered as the prime reason behind the success of a website on search engines.

Other than whatever I shared above Google also decides the ranking of a websites based on the user satisfaction level of a web site. No matter how good your website is, but if you are unable to satisfy your own visitors, Google won’t take much time to throw you out of the search engine results page.

With this I am here by completing the fourth chapter of the SEO tutorials series which I started a few weeks back. As I did promised to you guys that I will come up with a tutorial on each week, I planned a blog post for today also. Though to be very honest I actually did forget about it.

So what are your opinions about the SEO tutorials which I am sharing with you all? What do you think about this blog post of mine? Please do share whatever you think about this or any other blog post of my blog. You can do so with the help of the comments form given below.

I will be waiting for your responses on this blog post of how search engines work. I would love to discuss about your comments on this blog post.