Search Engine
By - Tamara Waters

Three Stages in How Search Engines Work

A search engine is a web-based computer program that organizes contents from all over the internet. To work, search engines generate their three stages: website crawling, indexing, and ranking. Also, the user enters a search query consisting of phrases or keywords, and the search engine also responds by providing a record of the results that best fit the user’s question. The results can choose the type of hyperlinks to websites, images, videos or other Internet data.

Crawling

The work of an Internet search engine could be divided into three phases. The first and most important is the practice of finding information. Secondly, there is the organization of this data to be obtained and presented efficiently when users are looking for something. Third, there is the evaluation of clues to show search engine customers the relevant answers to their questions. These three steps are often referred to as “crawling”, “indexing” and “ranking”.

Crawling

Search engines use portions of applications called webmasters to find publicly available information on the World Wide Web, which explains why this practice is called crawling. Web crawlers can sometimes also be called search engine crawlers. The method is complicated, but basically, crawlers/trackers locate the web servers (also called servers for short) that sponsor the sites and then continue the search.

They create a list of all the servers and determine how many sites are hosted on each of them. The number of pages of each site can be determined and the essence of the content, such as text, images, sounds, and videos. Crawlers also follow all hyperlinks that the site has, both within the site that links to pages inside the site and outside the site that link to other sites and find other web pages.

Indexing

IndexingInformation gathered by the crawlers is organized, sorted, and stored. The algorithms can later process this information for presentation to the search engine user. This is called indexing. Not all the information on the page is stored by the search engine, but only the crucial information needed for calculations to assess this website’s importance for ranking functions.

Ranking

RankingWhen a query is placed into a search engine, the index stacked in a hierarchical sequence using an algorithm. This ranking of your search engine result pages (SERPS) is known as ranking. Over the decades, algorithms have become more complicated to provide more relevant and accurate answers to search engine users’ questions.