Today, Google and other search engines are smarter than ever, they use machine learning to help process and rank information, and can understand natural human speech.
But the internet wasn’t always so easy to navigate! There was a time when you had to know the exact wording of a website’s title to find it. Search results were riddled with spam. Getting new content indexed by the search engines could take weeks to complete. Search engines certainly have changed!
Nowadays, you can browse the internet from anywhere, anytime. So you can go online every time you need something. You can find pages by following links from other pages but usually it is easier to search for things using a search engine.
How Search Engines Make An Index?
To find what you’re after, a search engine will scan its index of web pages for content related to your search.
A search engine makes this index using a program called a ‘web crawler’. This automatically browses the web and stores information about the pages it visits.
Every time a web crawler visits a web page, it makes a copy of it and adds its URL to an index. Once this is done, the web crawler follows all the links on the page, repeating the process of copying, indexing and then following the links. It keeps doing this, building up a huge index of many webpages as it goes.
Some websites stop web crawlers from visiting them. These pages will be left out of the index, along with pages that no-one links to.
The information that the web crawler puts together is then used by search engines. It becomes the search engine’s index. Every webpage recommended by a search engine has been visited by a web crawler.
NOTE: Web crawlers automatically browse the web and store information about the pages they visit.
How Do Search Engines Order Results?
A search engine results page with stars to show the position of each link.
Search engines sort results to show you the ones they think are the most useful.
PageRank is the best known algorithm which is used to improve web search results. In simple terms, PageRank is a popularity contest. The more links that point to a webpage, the more useful it will seem. This means it will appear higher up in the results.
The webpages on the first page of results are those that PageRank thinks are the best.
Search engines also pay attention to lots of other ‘signals’when working out the order to show you results. For example how often the page is updated and if it is from a trustworthy domain.
There are many search engines to choose from. Different search engines use different algorithms. This means that some sites will give their results in a different order, or they may even show completely different results altogether.
NOTE: Search engines use algorithms to sort the results and try to place the links which are most useful to you at the top of the page.
We will be breaking down Search Engine Optimization further to have a clear understanding of how it works.
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