What is a search engine?
Search engines have been a fundamental tool in the development of the internet. If they did not exist, in order to carry out a search we should write in a browser the URL of the pages and search the information inside each web. This process would be slow and information options would be limited.
Search engines are very complex applications. It updates itself basis. Basically, a search engine is a software or program. It locates content on the Internet in a fast and very efficient way. After your search request, it presents the results you have stored in your database.
The key is how they build their database and then categorize the results they will show their users. A very specific example of one of the well-known search engines that you have used is Google, Bing, Yahoo! Ask and maybe Torch, TorSearch, Ahmia, Gramos.
How search engine works:
Any curious person will ever wonder how the Google search engine works . Especially if you have a website and want to know how to overtake the competition.
Every day millions of users search the Internet, but what is behind that simple action? A complex mechanism that occurs in less than a second. The (changing) Google search algorithm has always been a mystery. The company has been improving and modifying it in recent years to give priority to its services. It is also updating the most current information.
Spiders:
Search engines use the use of spiders to collect information from websites. Spiders track websites by collecting data and follow the links on the pages. Spiders track the Internet almost to collect new and updated pages from the web. Thus they keep their results up to date.
Data treatment:
The data that spiders extract is treated differently by the various search engines. Search engines put the ‘weight’ on different components of a website and how it is integrated into the Web. In this way, they determine the order in which the websites should appear in the results of a search. The pages that contain the search results called SERPS – search engine result pages.
Finding the information through the web crawling:
Generally, the search engines find the information using an agent or robot. That robot called web crawler. It enters into a web page to collect some data, identify the links on this web page. And finally, follow these links as a user would do to repeat the process again and again.
In this way, the robot jumps from one link to another. It navigates through different pages. From which it gathers data with which to feed its database.
This is the way in which a search engine finds the information. This is half the process. Then it’s time to index the information.
Organizing information by indexing:
Once the robot or spider, also known as web crawler finds the information, an index is created. That index contains the essential information of the web page that is stored in the database. That will only be shown to the users when they make their request in the search interface of the search engine.
Whether indexed information is displayed under a user’s request. That ultimately depends on the search engine algorithm.
The ingenious part: classifying your results:
There are at least 200 different variables that Google weighs. It works each time we search for something. The Google ranking algorithm is a secret. But it includes several components, several core components.
1. Rank of the page:
Google classifies web pages by analyzing what other web pages are linked to it. It assigns a score to each page based on the number of links it has acquired and sees each link as a vote. But not all votes have the same value. A link from a relevant page that is itself a page with a high page rank score is more valued than a link from a page with a low page rank score.
2. Relevance and content quality:
Google mathematically models the words of a web page. Judge the relevance of a web page. It is by taking into account your search by counting the number of occurrences of the search words on the page. More importance is given to keywords in important parts of the text, such as the title of the page.
Google also considers the rarity keywords. If the search term is not used on the web randomly, that the pages that contain those words appear first.
Some words, such as “the” or “and”, is present more frequently than others. And are not useful when it comes to discerning the relevance of a page in a particular search.
As a result, Google gives those words much less importance. Google also looks for quality cues. Such as the length of a content and whether it has copied from other text.
3. User context
Google takes into account the context of your search. If you search for “restaurants” in Mexico, Google displays the results of Mexican pages. Because they are more likely to be more useful than restaurant pages in Brazil or the United States.
Google also takes into account the device you are using. Smartphone users may want information from restaurants closer to their immediate physical location. But, personal computer users don’t often search for that.
Google can also access your own search history and your behavior on the internet. Google makes it by offering personalized results.
Director of product management at Google says: “By understanding the relationships between things, Google can do a better job of understanding exactly what you’re looking for.”
4. Fighting against spam
The traffic of the web is a huge business. Ever since Google started, people have tried to trick the system into high positions. Webmaster has tried everything from filling your pages with popular search terms to buying links that lead to your links to increase your page rank.
That is why search engines try to filter this type of spam by perfecting their algorithms.
Verdict:
Usually, when an Internet user wants to get some information, the search engine is used. By definition, a search engine is a program that searches for keywords in documents. Then it provides the user with a list of documents in which these words are found. In simple words, the search engine connects the entered words (query) with the database it has created from web pages (index). Then, the search engine creates a list of URL links according to the search engine algorithm. Most closely matches the entered query) and their brief description. This is how search engine works.