There may be some differences in how the search engines work but the fundamentals remain the same. Each of them has to do the following tasks:
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Creating results
1. Crawling
Search engines have their own crawlers, small bots that scan websites on the world wide web. These little bots scan all sections, folders, subpages, content, everything they can find on the website.
Crawling is based on finding hypertext links that refer to other websites. By parsing these links, the bots are able to recursively find new sources to crawl.
2. Indexing
Once the bots crawl the data, it’s time for indexing. The index is basically an online library of websites.
Your website has to be indexed in order to be displayed in the search engine results page. Keep in mind that indexing is a constant process. Crawlers come back to each website to detect new data.
3. Creating results
Search engines create the results once the user submits a search query. It’s a process of checking the query against all website records in the index. Based on the algorithm, the search engine picks the best results and creates an ordered list.
