The Way Search Engines Work: A Simple Explanation

It is most likely that when we surf the Internet, we use popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN or AltaVista to find specific information on the web. But, did any of us ever wonder how exactly search engines work to provide us the information we are looking for? Well, it but obvious that none of us ever take the pain to understand the process. However, if you are planning to launch your own website and promote your business over the Internet, then you must have a clear knowledge about search engines and how it works.

What is “Index”?

With my experience as a SEO San Francisco, in this article I have explained how you can structure your website to get the maximum benefit and increase your brand strength by utilizing the power of search engines. There is a very common misconception among web users that search engines scan the Web to find the pages that matches the query that they had entered. But, the truth is search engines do not work that way at all. Instead, search engines look for it at its own copy of the Web, which is commonly known as an “Index”. Each and every search engine possess its own version of the Internet, which they use to determine the position of a website in search results.

Crawler or spider is a particular software that search engines use to make a list of web pages to add to its index. The spider crawls through the Web and adds the pages it visits to the list of indexed pages. Web spiders are capable of reading texts of a web page and locating other page links to make visits. The spiders follow this pattern and constantly crawl across the Web to find new pages to update or add to its existing index.

Sometimes, when a crawler visits a web page, a copy of that altered or added page effectively gets indexed in respective search engines. Therefore, when users enter their queries into a search engine, the software of the respective search engine look for matching pages within its own index.

Even though there are several other things involved in this process, I believe reading this article will at least help you to understand the basic of how search engines actually work.

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